Can we go back to where it all started? Although I made contact with Rev some time ago, I have only taken it more seriously recently. This is not so much because I didn't think it was worth taking seriously as the fact that finally, Microsoft have made it abundantly clear that do do not intend to review their decision to kill off Visual Basic. I have used VB exclusively for a number of years.
For those of you who don't know the story, let me tell it quickly. A bit more than 2 years ago, Microsoft launched VB.NET which was radically different to the previous VB. To me, it was not "Basic" at all. VB previously was user-centric and approximated the English language. In contrast, the .NET version was machine/system oriented and no longer approximated English. On top of that, it was much more complicated. Just to give you an example, whereas before you could put "Hello World" on the screen in a window by simply writing "Print 'Hello World'", in .NET you needed half a page of formal declarations just to put it on the console! I very quickly decided that .NET was not for me, but like many others I hoped that VB6 would be reprieved. Nobody really believed that Microsoft would actually go ahead with abandoning VB6 since it would be an incredibly irresponsible thing to do. They did. Just to let you know how it feels, let me mimic the situation as though it were Revolution. You are a lover of X-Talk. The kind of philosophy behind it is just what you always wanted and needed. You build your profession around it, set up your business, raise your family on the income you make from it, and have great hopes for the future of Revolution. And then you suddenly get an e-mail saying that Runtime Revolution is pleased to announce their launching of "Rev.NUT" which bears very little resemblance to the obsolete Transcript language that you have been using. None of the programs you have ever written will work in .NUT, and although an automatic converter utility will be provided, Runtime Revolution will make absolutely sure that it does not work at all, even for the simplest programs. Like it or lump it. So there you are, suddenly and unexpectedly a refugee. You never ever thought of yourself as a refugee, least of all in the field of programming. You have that lovely feeling of anomaly, like being stranded in the middle of the ocean and not belonging anywhere any more. OK. Back to me again. I have found RunRev. It possess all the characteristics of the programming values I hold dear. But certainly its IDE is strange to say the least. I don't learn anything easily, and I sometimes get confused and make mistakes. Like anyone else in a learning situation, I suffer from blindspots until my genetic programming is ready for me to have the "aha" experience and I discover what should have been obvious. However, such personal difficulties have an advantage. Because I suffer in order to learn, I understand in my skin the problems of any beginner, and that's why I have been a teacher all my life and why for quite a number of years I was responsible for computer training. I don't think I was too bad at it. However, the advantage back then was that when I was preparing training, if I found myself in a situation where what I needed to teach did not make much sense, I had the power to consult with management and the thing got changed. Nobody expected me to teach a psychological mess. Being a teacher has made me interested in psychology, and one hard lesson that I have learned is that ALL ideas are valuable, even wrong ones. That is, of course, if you want to value them. If not, you can throw them away, as many people do. To me, this is a terrible waste. I much prefer to engage in a creative process than to engage in symmetrical battles as a result of my mono-perception of a situation which in reality has multiple aspects. I was perfectly happy with what came out of my suggestion for correcting the IDE's script editor because I learned a lot and because it revealed some weaknesses in the setup as it stands. First of all, it never occurred to me that the TAB key could be used for anything else than indenting a single line. In retrospect of course, I was suffering from typical learner's blindness since I could have found the information about it tucked away in a corner of the Help and in the Preferences. But it was only half way through the discussion that there was something very significant that I had missed. Nevertheless, I don't think that this detracts from the points that I made. Anyone not born and bred with X-Talk would be likely to fall into the same trap. So here is the synthesis of my suggestion for correcting the IDE's script editor. It presumes that programming and design norms are to be taken into account, and that likely pitfalls of newcomers are to be avoided as much as possible. 1. Existing bugs should be removed. The very fact that a newcomer cannot easily see the difference between a feature and a bug shows that there is something wrong somewhere. Bugs confuse everybody and everything. As Mark suggested in his e-mail to us all by suggesting that "it is not unreasonable to give users the choice": 2. Leave the existing auto-formatting facilities entirely alone. BUT 3. When the auto-formatting is turned off, it means what it says. This means that changes to existing text can be made in the manner of a normal text editor. TAB creates a single indentation in a single line. In addition, perhaps the switch for turning auto-formatting on and off could be put in a more convenient place Also, descriptions of auto-formatting and the (non-standard) use of the TAB key could be more prominently displayed in the Help. Now, if we can discuss this on the List and arrive at some kind of consensus about it, then perhaps we would earn sufficient respect on the part of the management to get something implemented. Finally, I would like to apologise for the rather confused nature of my explanation. On top of my status as a refugee, I am extremely upset at the conflict my suggestion seems to have stimulated. Perhaps one reason for this is that to have new ideas, one must necessarily be provocative, and this is easily misinterpreted by those who are motivated to do so. I am seeking to deflate the situation by returning to the scene of the crime and re-tracing my steps. But only you are able to tell me whether I have succeeded or failed. Bob _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
