That's why I chose to say it's my gripe with it, and not a level criticism that you should take to heart in any way if you want to sell a single license ;) You have reason to be happy when the worst thing I can bring up about the platform is a personal bias in hearing the videos :p
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Paul Doyle <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 21 June 2013 18:33, Raffaele Fragapane <[email protected]>wrote: > >> If anything my only gripe with fabric right now is that they keep >> referring to TDs as the slow children of RnD, as if being a TD means you >> can cobble together a script as long as you can chain run it to debug, but >> God forbid you'd be able to run a compiler :p > > > There's a big difference between a trained software engineer that can > write multithreaded C++ and the standard TD (that I see most consistently > across studios) that can write a bit of C++ but is most comfortable with > Python/MEL etc. Finding a domain expert in software engineering that's also > a domain expert in VFX is quite challenging - most TDs do not fit this > description. What we see is a lot of people that know exactly what they > want to achieve, but don't have the time, inclination or skillset to write > it in C++. That might not fit your definition of a TD, but outside of large > studios I don't meet many TDs that are C++ programmers - they self-identify > as such. > > You're correct in saying that the actual value of KL is in the various > multi-threading paradigms (and the ease of access to them). However, having > spent the first 18 months of our existence trying to market a language and > a multithreading engine, we realised that nobody cares :) Instead we > simplified the technical message to "KL is a high-level language like > Python, these are normally slow but KL is as fast as highly optimized C++. > This means people that are comfortable with high-level languages can now > write high performance code". > > In reality, nobody cares about that much either. What people want to know > is "so what can I do that I couldn't do before?". So it might end up being > a bit simplistic or patronizing to people that understand the technology, > but the intent is to try and make it easy to understand why what we're > doing is valuable. Marketing a platform to everyone is difficult - if we > make it so technical people are satisfied from the outset, then we lose > everyone else. Now we're showing actual solutions, it becomes more > interesting to understand 'how?' - so we might have to adapt a bit. You'll > be pleased to know we're working with a PR agency who want to rewrite all > of our copy :) > > The last thing I'll say is that the dynamic compilation is as important as > the multi-threading - speed of development, ease of deployment, portability > of code and outright performance. We used to message heavily around this > and it didn't get us very far. > > -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
