Why is LiveCode not recognized more as an app developer language?

[richmond62]

I wouldn't recommend that anyone try and create a Sanskrit word-processor.

After all, before one does that one has to acquire at least a superficial knowledge of the language
and its multiple orthographies.

But, while game creation is undoubtedly fun, I have a feeling that Roblox, and a lot of other things of that sort,
allow game creators to "get there" without learning some of the very necessary programming skills that will allow
them, having made their game, to transfer skills learnt during that game creation to, let us say, some sort of
data-processing app (however 'mundane' that may seem to your youngsters, that is where 90% of the programming
goes).

Working "in the other direction", i.e. learn how to do 'mundane' stuff first, should supply learners with a mental skill set
that allows them to move from 'donkey work' in Python, C#, or LiveCode to game creation without having to learn
all sorts of new things.

[richmond62]

However . . .

The reason my EFL school in Bulgaria, having gone from 0 to 50 kids in 2 years, and then stuck at about 50 kids for 16 years is because:

1. I have never advertised.

2. I have no great ambitions to make vast piles of money: as I just go on doing the "same old sugar" years after year.

3. I am aware that were my school to expand much beyond what it is certain attractive aspects of it will get lost.

No: re Livecode: They should not worry about #3

They need to get their skates on re #1

#2 is important if one wants to continually plough money back into one's operation, upgrade, update, introduce more features
and so on.

So, while it is endlessly fascinating to chew over topics such as 'Roblox versus LC', 'Scratch versus LC', 'Pythong versus LC'
unless #1 happens, and as a consequence #2 happens, our discussion will lead to absolutely nothing.

There is part of me that wonders if the end-users care more about this than 'our friends' do.

[stam]

Interestingly, if you look at the scripting required for Roblox with Luau, it's a lot more complex than LC. And has a lot fewer coding conveniences that LC script. But makes up for it is their IDE - and at the end of the day it's an IDE that is target-orientated (ie creating games) so it's very good.

LC's IDE is a lot more barebones/less regimented because it's open-ended. That's great for experienced users, but less helpful for beginners.

It depends what audience you want to target; if you offer an open-ended IDE that can do anything, then newbies and youngsters aren't going to be the target audience, but rather more serious developers.

if you want to capture other types of users, the IDE should cater for that (in the case of kids something that captures their imagination and gives them motivation above and beyond 'the mundane').

So maybe a game studio for youngsters - and maybe like a database app creation studio (like FileMaker Pro) for the grown ups would greatly increase uptake... but how knows...

[FourthWorld]

So maybe a game studio for youngsters

We'll need a frame rate boost first. LC is great for a nearly infinite range of productivity apps, and can be used to certain types of turn-based strategy games, but even single-sprite animation is cumbersome, and multi-sprite can approach prohibitive.

That said, I understand the team is exploring options for improving rendering speed, and in conjunction with the forthcoming compiler new doors will open.

In the meantime, one of my hobbies is hex-and-counter tabletop wargaming, and I've been tempted to put together a framework for making digital versions of such things. Graphically undemanding, they would fit well within the mix of LC's strengths and weaknesses. I put a note on the LC list hoping to find fellow grognards who might be interested, but alas it seems the intersection of LC's audience and one of the narrowest genres in tabletop gaming is about zero. I mention it here just in case someone not on the list might see this and get excited by the prospect. I believe there may be applications for such a framework for simulations outside of tactical skirmishes (supply chain, disaster relief, etc), but unless there's much interest among LiveCoders I'll probably explore that in JavaScript.

and maybe like a database app creation studio (like FileMaker Pro) for the grown ups

https://appli.io/

[mtalluto]

But, while game creation is undoubtedly fun, I have a feeling that Roblox, and a lot of other things of that sort,
allow game creators to "get there" without learning some of the very necessary programming skills that will allow
them, having made their game, to transfer skills learnt during that game creation to, let us say, some sort of
data-processing app (however 'mundane' that may seem to your youngsters, that is where 90% of the programming
goes).

Working "in the other direction", i.e. learn how to do 'mundane' stuff first, should supply learners with a mental skill set
that allows them to move from 'donkey work' in Python, C#, or LiveCode to game creation without having to learn
all sorts of new things.

It is interesting that Roblox came up in this thread. I smile because Christian, my middle-school-aged son, develops using Roblox Studio.

He has formulated a team that spans different states in the US. He happens to be the programmer on the team. Others are artists, level designers, and QA testers. This looks like modern software companies today.

His method reminds me of a time long ago and how I started learning to program. I read magazines full of code that I would type into my computer. I learned in my early days by modifying the working code published in these magazines. You change, break, and fix, all the while learning in a fun and self-engaging way. Yes, many of the apps I copied were games.

Christian is doing the same thing using more contemporary methods. He watches YouTube videos and copies code snippets that he can apply to his project. I have seen his progress and knowledge grow in a short time.

I think this organic and self-motivated form of learning can be far more powerful and longer lasting than more formal learning methods. Plus, he is learning about working in a team, being responsible for completing his part, and dealing with everything we face in our software studio.

They have big plans to make their game available in the marketplace created by Roblox. The ecosystem is in place to help them launch their game with a minimal amount of work and provide a higher chance of completing the big picture. His passion and work ethic drives him to program late into the evening after having been in school all day.

I am thrilled to see his approach and progress so far. He can take this experience and replicate it again and again. Now he is starting to make YouTube videos to teach others how to do what he does. What a wonderful world we live in where a young person interested in game development can take their dream to reality. The Roblox IDE is perfect for what it is intended to do. He can sidestep this to other veins in the software development world. As far as I am concerned, his resume has already started.

You can do a lot with LiveCode. It has served me and my dreams of making software for a living. Yes, LiveCode is more open-ended and capable of making a wide range of software outside the 3D gaming world. I think it is solid as a business app maker. The range of examples demonstrated on this forum alone shows it can be used almost anywhere. As Stam mentioned, the IDE plays a significant role in attracting people to a given platform. Roblox has done an excellent job attracting new and seasoned developers to its platform. LiveCode 10, with its new IDE and strong web app support, should have a positive effect on new adoption.

https://appli.io is an example of an IDE designed to attract a broader audience to the beauty of LiveCode. Our work in this space should introduce people to LiveCode thanks to future co-marketing efforts between LiveCode and Canela. Our work with integrating the LiveCode language along with LiveCloud data should generate some cross-pollination. Soon all of these platforms will point to each other in a meaningful way to widen the net of attraction to better ways of making data-driven software.

Two ways to use the LiveCode language and engine is a good thing.

[richmond62]

I smile because Christian, my middle-school-aged son, develops using Roblox Studio.

A very salient post.

However, in our supposedly global village, there are many worlds: the first, second and third world,
and the level of 'sophistication' of the expectations of middle-school children is rather different in each.

I recently had a message from my godbrother (who stays in India) with photographs of a teenager doing great
things with a BBC Micro computer from about 1983, now.

Admittedly I thought that was a legpull, and it does seem way too retro to be taken seriously.

However, living in the second world (as I do), I am well aware that what teenagers in the first world were
contented with (if a teenager can ever be contented) in 2000 will keep teenagers over here perfectly
happy 22 years later in terms of computer programming offered at school level.

Of course a very large number of teenagers over here are beavering happily away at Roblox and so on
in their own time.

And as what schools dish out over here to middle school children is a black screen with Python all over it,
LiveCode comes as a breath of fresh air.

AND, as I have stated before, I am cheesed-off with would-be providers of computer programming instruction
measuring their products against the riches of North America and Western Europe,
-

Extremely retro stuff from MetaCard that offers a lot of useful content.

-
Another thing that makes me laugh cynically is all the hot air spouted by the UN and so forth about bringing
all children up-to-par in terms of computer programming and such like with the privileged quarter of the world:
as there is very little evidence that that is being done.

Certainly throwing second-hand PCs at people is insufficient.
----

The other day I installed RevMedia 4 (i.e. the FREE version) on someone's machine running Linux (Ubuntu 16.04 32-bit)
and they have been having useful fun ever since. You should have seen that kid's pleasure and his 2 eyes as big as coffee cups!

[stam]

and maybe like a database app creation studio (like FileMaker Pro) for the grown ups

https://appli.io/

Appli is a strong product and offers many attractive features, but FMP it is not… in my mind if the database maintenance and integration of FMP could be integrated into LC’s IDE that would really offer a novel attraction…

[richmond62]

if the database maintenance and integration of FMP could be integrated into LC’s IDE that would really offer a novel attraction…

Quite possibly, but not as far as attracting schools and schoolchildren.

[stam]

if the database maintenance and integration of FMP could be integrated into LC’s IDE that would really offer a novel attraction…

Quite possibly, but not as far as attracting schools and schoolchildren.

Maybe if you actually read my post Richard was responding to?

if you want to capture other types of users, the IDE should cater for that (in the case of kids something that captures their imagination and gives them motivation above and beyond 'the mundane').

So maybe a game studio for youngsters - and maybe like a database app creation studio (like FileMaker Pro) for the grown ups would greatly increase uptake... but how knows...

[richmond62]

I am currently trying out Appli.

[FourthWorld]

and maybe like a database app creation studio (like FileMaker Pro) for the grown ups

https://appli.io/

Appli is a strong product and offers many attractive features, but FMP it is not…

Agreed. Appli serves an adjacent, though not identical, market.

Appli is also more affordable, offers a richer range of GUI controls, and runs on more platform.

And Appli makes standalones, something FMP used to do before that company decided to cull their own user base by ditching it (which turned out well for a great many FMP competitors; most of the FMP refugees I meet crossed the border in search of runtimes).

[AndyP]

appli looks very slick, but its more competition for LiveCode.

So the elephant in the room.

appli is built with LiveCode, the LiveCode licence states

c) You are prohibited from creating or distributing Created Software to be used and marketed as a generic rapid application development tool. Any Created Software that does not involve any sort of script editing will not be considered prohibited.

As LiveCode have not stomped all over the appli app, one must assume that appli was made in conjunction with LiveCode. This leads to, I think the following question.

Why is appli, appli and not LiveCode?

[stam]

And Appli makes standalones, something FMP used to do before that company decided to cull their own user base by ditching it (which turned out well for a great many FMP competitors; most of the FMP refugees I meet crossed the border in search of runtimes).

Almost but not quite my point.

Ignore the user-facing interface side of things. FMP provides a rich database experience *for the developer* which is grounded in graphical display of table occurrences and their relationships, married with a powerful calculation engine that is actually half the scripting environment.

When developing in FMP, you will spend the first 30-50% of dev time actually getting the data structures right and it’s a joy to use. User-facing GUI is very much secondary to this, but the database is so well integrated that it feels like one.

This is what is missing in LC; LiveCloud (the backbone for Appli) is nice and works well - but is quite barebones compared to the developer experience in FMP, and SQLite/other databases in LC even more so.

I do like Appli - it’s geared towards churning out quick and nice interfaces. But I wish there was the data backend integration in LC that FMP has…

[FourthWorld]

This is what is missing in LC; LiveCloud (the backbone for Appli) is nice and works well - but is quite barebones compared to the developer experience in FMP, and SQLite/other databases in LC even more so.

I do like Appli - it’s geared towards churning out quick and nice interfaces. But I wish there was the data backend integration in LC that FMP has…

Agreed. Appli serves an adjacent, though not identical, market.

One advantage to things made with the LC technology is that LC has no built-in database, instead letting the developer use any of the most popular DB engines in the world, with all of the documentation, support resources, and tooling that have made them the world leaders.

Last time I used FMP I was saddened to see it still had a "Repair Database" item IN THE FILE MENU. And I needed it; the file the client sent me to evaluate was corrupted. The need use "Repair Database" has been front-and-center in their user experience for decades, yet the apparent brittleness requiring it be readily available in the main menu bar has not been resolved. I'd guess their transition to the cloud allows them to drop their own DB engine in favor of something industry-standard like Postgres, or one of the other DB engines LC users can choose from.

After another few calls from prospective clients leaving FMP, I did a little recon to try to assess mindshare of that platform over time. Just from personal contacts with FMP devs and having attended local FMP user group meetings I had at least an anecdotal sense of attrition rates, but I was surprised to see a subsidiary of one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations on the planet show search interest only slightly greater than interest in humble LiveCode:

[FourthWorld]

Why is appli, appli and not LiveCode?

A truck and a sedan are both vehicles, and have overlapping use cases, but also sufficient differentiation that there's a thriving place for each among people looking for vehicles.

The LiveCode engine is very powerful, thanks in large part to an expressive, flexible scripting language with a very rare integration of GUI elements as integral parts of the language. Time invested in learning to use LiveCode Script well pays ever-bigger dividends in the scope of what a developer can do with it.

This offers tremendous benefits for developers and even hobbyists who enjoy programming. But people enjoy many things, and not all of them include programming.

Yet nearly everyone can benefit from bespoke software, and since the dawn of GUIs there's always been a niche for assembling software visually. CourseBuilder, OWL, VPL, Authorware, Prograph, Scratch, and many others are as much a part of the evolution of making software as Pascal, HyperTalk, C, JavaScript, Python, and the rest.

In recent years there's been a renewed interest in visual programming, rebranded for today's audiences under the moniker "no-code".

(As a side note you'll also see the term "low-code" used these days, but that term is so vague and overused it serves no useful purpose for understanding software tool categories; I generally avoid it in all discussions outside of SEO.)

Exactly why has entered a new heyday in this third decade of the 21st century is worthy of study. There's more to it than the catchy "no-code" phrase. I believe it rests on a combination of UX achievements supported by cloud technologies and computing ubiquity via mobile, coming together resonantly for an audience who came of age in a world of smaller-focus apps, setting the stage for a new set of expectations reasonably well met by some of the better "no-code" tools.

I think the UX part of this is key, not only for understanding this resurgent interest but also in recognizing the mutually-complimentary relationship between LC and Appli.

LC Ltd is a technology company whose core strength is delivering a rather amazing collection of tooling that makes crafting GUIs simpler than nearly any alternative covering the same scope of platforms.

LC's core audience has never been any one segment, but a very long tail of diverse use cases ranging from courseware in schools to analytics in the enterprise and thousands of extremely vertical solutions for small and medium organizations in between.

LC offers no specific solution to a specific segment (and indeed attempts to focus on one have been disappointing), instead delivering a unique way of working that allows programmers to craft a vast diverse range of unique specialized solutions cost-effectively.

Appli is primarily a design effort. With all the strengths of LC as an underlying technology, the Appli team can focus on deep research and a highly-iterative design process to craft a user experience finely tailored for a specific subset of personalities and organizational roles.

Either project could do what the other does (and since LC also makes an IDE and the Appli team writes a lot of code, to some degree they do). But why?

There are only so many hours in the day. Every activity carries opportunity cost: doing any one thing means not doing everything else.

A technology company with a long tail and a design project with laser focus on one segment seems a very good compliment for one another.

And apparently LiveCode agrees: Appli was the subject of a featured talk at the last LiveCode conference, and based on that I would imagine we'll see more comarketing going forward.

They seem very happy with the arrangement between the two products, and I'm equally happy supporting them both.