I don't do dbase much now, but did years ago... I don't know if any
of you ever remember a remarkable implementation of this in the early
Mac relational dBase called "Helix" way back when. I thought it was
very powerful in my naivete in those days when playing with it next
to Hypercard... thinking "this is neat I don't have to do any
scripting at all," and for simple stuff it was brilliantly free of
code. But in reality, I ended up actually doing really intricate
things in Hypercard...
With Helix when you started getting like 20 tables in your database
with all kinds of relationships going, this incredible visual maze
started to build up with lines going everywhere... you had to drag
out the icons to make room to make sure things were clear, and you
would have needed to get a wide format printer to print the thing
(if you wanted to) and the map would have probably been about eight
feet long three feet tall, an exaggeration of course, but you get the
point. Past a certain point, the development process ground down to
molasses pace. I was a bit of Helix advocate for a very short while,
but our IT team here responsible for development took one look and
said "no way!" They went with Acius 4D in the end. It has a great
balance between visual representation of tables and field
relationships and raw code procedures... I think Helix died.
Richard is right... programming, especially xTalk, (because it is so
un-onerous) is actually a break from the helter skelter of external
life and you slip into a stream of pristine clarity and focus if you
get real mental space to do this work. Of course if you talk like
that to anyone, they think you are nuts (smile).
On Dec 03, 2005, at 2:11 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
He said that while iconic programming had a lot of value for simple
things, to do anything complex meant creating diagrams that were
difficult to read, and that ultimately a substantial program like
even a basic text editor would be as hard to read expressed purely
visually as it would be in textual code.
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