Amazing. Yesterday I spent the morning in the library reading the O'Reilly book
"Beyond Java." It's not worth buying, but if you see it in a library take a
look. It is a sales pitch for Ruby replacing Java, but could just as well be
about RR. The storyline is that C++ was horrible, Java better, Ruby on Rails is
the second coming. The author interviews Java high-flyers who don't use it
anymore. They say it is too bloated, too many libraries and dependencies. I had
never heard of serverside.com and wrote a note to look it up when I got home.
About the marketing. When RR hires me to do it, this would be my strategy:
Forget about people who know other languages. They won't want to give up what
they've learned. If I could program in C++ I probably wouldn't be using RR
either. I would put out a bunch of youtube videos showing people of various
ages and interests whipping out programs about projects they are interested in.
Show a grandma sending a birthday revlet to her grand-daughter. Show a guy in a
genetics lab writing a front end to his database. Show RR in schools, in
businesses, at home. Videos four minutes long. Show people creating a program
that they never thought they could.
As for the Hypercard/Metacard/RR genealogy, there might be some people who want
to still use their Hypercard skills and will find refuge at RR. There is
probably a way to attract them without scaring away others. By the way, in our
house we always called Metacard Hypercard, now we call Runtime Revolution
Metacard. We're always one name behind.
The slashdot readers want computer languages to be complicated because they
enjoy the challenge and feel empowered by knowing that they (unlike the average
guy or gal) can write "complicated programs in a real language." Most people
(especially those who might actually **pay** for software) write code to solve
a problem they couldn't do any other way. Those are the people RR should be
focusing on.
Enough already.
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