I learnt Hypercard without a book,
and I extended my knowledge, as RR extended xTalk, in the
same way:
by doing!
That's great if you have all the time in the world to "doing" it
wrong many times! Especially when the documentaion is just plain
wrong!
Ludwig Wittgenstein said that too many people Philosophise
and not enough DO PHILOSOPHY.
Now if we all DID Runtime Revolution:
i.e. got in there, got our feet wet, realised that (despite
a few itches) it really is just about the best
cross-platform RAD out there, and used the built-in
documentation as well as we are able to . . .
We would probably shut-up about the 'awful this and the
awful that'.
Although I am a mere 43 (I have a feeling Dan Shafer is
older) I started computer programming with FORTRAN 4 in
1975 - then BASIC, then PASCAL, ZILOG . . . those who moan
(I don't mean the odd 'twitch') and continue to moan about
RR's documentation and "lack-of-ease-of-use" ought to try
programming with one of those horrible Hollerith card
punchers:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/cards.html
a stack of cards,
I did all that too. Started out working in Assembler on Minicomputers
and IBM/ICL mainframes.
One difference was the number of customers you'd have for a given
product. Most companies sold computers systems where the hardware was
at least £10,000 and most likely more like £30,000. The system was
also specified up front and the user paid extra for addition features
from the base system. Today, we write general purpose software to be
sold to a mass market, running of different hardware and operating
systems.
Another difference is that the systems back then had about 10% of the
complexity of the Mac/PC today. Also in those environments there were
two areas you had there were seperate, e.g. the language, like
Assember, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, C etc. which had separate
documentation similar to code warrior today. IOW, you can get any one
of a 100 C/C++, Pascal or Fortran books. In this case there was a
bible you could look to to see what was *supposed* to happen.
Also when you did find a problem, it was much easier to patch the OS
or the Assembler/Compiler, and you could step into almost any part of
the system on a machine code basis. The Debugger was usually in ROM
which helped too, you couldn't corrupt it.
In the case of environments like RunRev, it's an all in one solution
and there isn't a bible or a host of other places you can look to see
what is *supposed* to happen. You are relient on the documentation
that comes with the system, and since the IDE is part of that same
system you are developing, the problems are much more complex.
a Fortran Manual (remember all that stuff about
formatting?),
and the 2-3 week wait while your cards sat in a queue at
one of the few Universities that offered a public service.
The difference was you were not trying to make a living out of it,
and, even if you were, the market was FAR less competitive and the
application FAR less complex.
All the Best
Dave
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