Newbie4 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 9:30 pm
I was pointing out that by not releasing numbers, they were hurting their own cause.
Yes, and I was asking how.
No one except programmers know what the TIOBE list is or really care.
People who sell development tools care very much.
For anyone else, true, it doesn't matter at all whether they read the list. What's relevant is the list itself, among us, here in this discussion of selling development tools.
As someone who advises on software marketing, you read the TIOBE list, yes? What does that list suggest to you in terms of opportunities and risks for LiveCode?
It is Alexa ranking that we care about, not Tiobe. Globally, the ranking of LiveCode.com is 154,285. The Million Pixel Webpage was once 127 and is now, after 11 years, is still 150,011 - better than LiveCode.
Alexa rank is useful for many strategic comparisons. I included it in my UX talk for LC Global, in the early parts on defining product strategy. These days I tend to find Google Trends even more useful because it isn't limited to domain names and offers greater flexibility with direct comparisons of search terms and adjustable history length going all the way back to 2004.
All three, Alexa, Google Trends, and TIOBE, are metrics of things that have already happened, not a prescription of things to do going forward.
In that regard, there's one key difference: Alexa compares LiveCode to car manufacturers, pop stars, toaster ovens, and literally everything else on the web; TIOBE compares the LiveCode software development toolkit to other software development toolkits.
As means of measuring the past, both are useful. For determining what to do next, the more specific comparison offered by TIOBE may provide more specific guidance, inviting us to readily see what people have chosen, so we can then use different tools to try to understand
why those choices were made.
I agree somewhat that the question is not now to get C++ developers to stop using C++ (though these days professional programming is inherently multilingual anyway, and a good scripting language is useful for any developer to add to the mix of languages they enjoy).
The key question here is: why have so many people who wanted to learn programming chosen something other than LiveCode?
There are a good many reasons for this, and between Malcolm Gladwell and Geoff Moore we can find what may be the most salient one: people choose what other people use, so once a certain tipping point has been reached it becomes increasingly difficult for competing interests to gain as much mindshare.
LC/MC has been around longer than most, but was locked behind a proprietary paywall for most of its life, while the rest of the world was moving infrastructure and tools to open source. Sure, LC became open in 2013, but that's pretty late in the game, so by the time it did Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Lua, Scratch, and others were already well entrenched.
This isn't to say there's no place for LC. Not at all. That's the other important takeaway from studying the TIOBE list: there isn't just one language there, and no single one of them has any really significant market share by itself. There are tons of languages, on a list with a very, very long tail. And new languages get invented every year, and older languages sometimes find new life (ah, Erlang's comeback with Cloud orchestration).
When HyperTalk premiered, all we had was Pascal, C, Assembler, Cobol, and a GUI-less BASIC.
We're in a different world now. Thanks to HyperCard, scripting languages won. In the old world there was only bash, and now most of the world's popular languages are dynamically compiled. They're all live code. Even Swift, which offers static compilation, also provide live coding options.
LiveCode has a place among them, offering an unmatched mix:
1) High-level scripting
2) Inherent language support for GUI elements
3) Broad platform coverage
In any single one of those categories, or even two, you can find many alternatives, some of them very good.
But if you're looking for all three of those AFAIK you have only one choice: LiveCode.
And as valuable as that combination is for so many things, it's not needed by everyone. No single language covers all needs. That's why we have so many, and so many new ones that continue to crop up.
If we're going to adopt a strategy for LiveCode to attain what I feel is its rightful place among the world's great languages, we'll want to understand those languages and the choices people made to make them so popular.
Someone tried it before with a website of 1001 programs written in LiveCode and it never grew much. The LiveCode community is very small and tight. Most people will only join in if it was sponsored by LiveCode itself and not another single person endeavor.
Just putting LiveCode Ltd's name on a project will not instantly make the project successful.
And conversely, no truly great project will be held back if sufficiently well executed regardless of who writes the check for the hosting.
Come up with a great project, and LC Ltd would probably support it. Write them. You're far more likely to get a response from them when you write to them than writing to other LiveCode users in a user-to-user support forum.
But think the project through. Make a compelling pitch. Learn what motivates today's learners to choose a language, and demonstrate how the project will address those concerns.
Studying and supporting the user experience is how great things happen.
And if we study earnestly, we can see that the growth of many of the world's most popular languages is a function of the community who uses them, far more than the core dev team who maintains them.
As for the MillionDollarHomePage: It was launched in August and became an Internet phenomenon.
August of 2005. 12 years ago.
It was a great moment in history, but isolated to that moment. And he wasn't selling anything other than the novelty of the page, which is why we don't see a MillonSodaCapsHomePage or a MillionBurgersHomePage. It was a fine invention, but a one-off.
The thing that made it so interesting to so many people was that it was original. It didn't merely emulate something that had come before it.
All good viral marketing has that quality. Freshness. New. Something we haven't seen before.
So I very much like the spirit of doing something no one else has done, and the vision of doing it to introduce more people to a software development toolkit.
Now the task at hand is to study what learners have been doing, look at the unique value of LC not yet recognized by them, and invent an entirely never-before-seen method of communicating that value.