Thank you for your many replies to my questions. I'll try to take your word
regarding your programming language recommendation, but I really don't yet
understand why you or Rodney feel this way. Object orientation has always
made complete sense to me - the encapsulation of very small functions and
their assembly into larger components. Traditional programming describes a
sequence of events, detail by detail instead of an assemblage of simple
parts. This seems counter-intuitive to me. As I understand it, Transcript
is not object oriented. It may have syntax that resembles English, but the
construction of systems is what I am aiming at and it seems natural to
define a system in terms of itty bitty parts that combine together to make
bigger and more complex things. Think of the Model T car. Pretty useful,
but really not all that complex considering it is made up of merely 300
fairly simple parts. Looked at a part at a time, creating a Model T seems
quite within practical limits.
Greg,
I agree that it would be nice if Revolution was truly object
oriented. Right now, it is "kind of" object oriented. It uses many
concepts from OOP (object oriented programming), but doesn't go all
the way to including ideas such as inheritance.
So, you can take all of those itty bitty parts and combine them
together the way that you think. What you can't do is easily define a
new kind of part and have it inherit all of the capabilities of some
other part. So, if you need a new widget that does things slightly
differently than some other widget, you can use some of your previous
work, but you essentially end up having to rewrite your new widget
from the beginning. In a true OOP you could simply start with the
original widget and make the few changes that you needed.
Due to its English-like syntax, Revolution, the language (previously
called Transcript) is easier for many people to work with than the
other more foreign seeming languages. Given the fact that you can
graphically define the pieces that you are putting together and then
fill in the details (scripts), it is an easy way to get started. Were
you to go to another language, such as say, Python, you might get a
fully object oriented language, but you would then have to start at
an even lower foundational level. In most languages, you have to
learn to do everything with just text first. Then you start learning
to use graphics. Here, you can use either text or graphics pretty
interchangeably. That is a big part of what makes Rev easy to use.
Combine that with the fact that you can simply add new parts as you
go along and test immediately and you have a really dynamic
environment to work in.
-Rodney
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