I haven't stuck my oar into this discussion until now as I was interested which way it would go.
My view may be a bit different to most of the "real programmers" who have offered views and code examples. I am not a "real programmer" insofar as I do not depend on programming for my bread and cheese, and have never had to. I have not touched any programming language other than Metacard/RunRev since 2001. I think that comparing: length of code samples is a bit silly: "It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it." AND, surely, the first and foremost point to be made about RunRev is that little boys and girls (8-11 years old) can produce something that works and is not a Powerpoint clone in half-an-hour (I have seen it happening right here in my school). Teachers and other non-programmers can, very quickly, assemble "programs" / "applications" / "thingies" / "widgets" to do what they want to do without having to either hire a computer specialist or spend donkey's ages on a programming course. Runtime Revolution is all about empowerment; it should not be compared with C++ and so forth, because they are 2 different creatures. C++ lives in an aquarium, nurtured by trained zookeepers: RunRev is like my cat - much more cuddley and approachable, and doesn't need lots of fancy care and food. One of the things that the lecturers at Abertay University (where I did an MSc, for my sins) kept rambling on about was that programmers had to become sensitive to the needs of specialists in other areas they would be working for. Forget the "sensitive" programmer; RunRev can "sensitise" almost anyone to doing the job themselves. The other day, having read some of the postings in this thread I cracked open Richard Bannister's Mac port of the Horizon emulator of the BBC and "did a bit of BASIC" - all great, sentimental fun, and all that, but nothing quite beats the WYSIWYG of the RunRev IDE. You can keep your command-line languages with funny syntax! Those who want the command-line languages with funny syntax, and who have ego problems that need to be buttressed up by their being "real programmers" will always be like that. Let's just let them get on with their thing: ultimately RunRev (or something very similar) will be used by far more people to do far more creative things. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
