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

[FourthWorld]

Companies do not compel customers to their marketing.

Where customers may choose to promote a product, they are inspired by the company's excellent example.

[richmond62]

I Google the phrase: livecode datagrid, or: livecode array.

Naturally . . . every time I get stuck (a lot of the time) I enter 'LiveCode' and the term I am stuck with
into a search engine, and lots of helpful stuff pops up.

And that is wonderful, but if I just enter the term I'm stuck with and forget 'LiveCode' I get all sorts of stuff
relating to my search term in other programming languages . . . so 'buggins' who has not come across LiveCode
may never come across LiveCode.

[Bernard]

I get all sorts of stuff
relating to my search term in other programming languages . . . so 'buggins' who has not come across LiveCode
may never come across LiveCode.

There's basically no way for Livecode to get a discussion of their Datagrid to the top of Google's results -- unless they pay Google to put an ad there whenever someone searches for "datagrid".

Microsoft has a Datagrid, many javascript frameworks have a Datagrid.

Google would lose users if the first page only returned results that were irrelevant to the millions of people looking for information on non-Livecode datagrids.

I had a project that I wanted to at least be in the top 10 results on Google. I was competing against major international companies for the same eyeballs. Through various means I managed to get my website returned as the top result with no advertising budget. A couple of years later, it was not even on the first page. That was with me spending days working with Google's tools and honing my webite, just targeting a single phrase.

[richmond62]

Unfortunately, while lobbyists are looked upon as morally dicky in government,
no one seems to mind much in terms of search engines.

If the world of search engines were a meritocracy things would show up based on end-user searches and clicks; not
what money and a bunch of bots have been doing while we were tucked up in bed.

I have sent off my first draft of my 'thing' to that educator's magazine in England . . .

[richmond62]

Also: doing a Googly-Woogly for 'LiveCode' brings up LiveCode and a list of "people also searched for' programming languages.

Doing a Googly-Woogly for 'Python' brings up a list of "people also searched for' programming languages that does NOT include LiveCode'.

Bl**dy Scratch is there.

[Bernard]

i'm referring to indy or pro versions. This is a paid product; i therefore except a minimum effort from the company to promote this.

Why? because what happens to my time and money invested when the company go under because they weren't able to expand to a level they could be sustainable?

Whilst I have no knowledge of the inner workings of the company, do you not think that having produced an IDE for 20 years that they haven't done a cost-benefit analysis on advertising? I assume they have. As they've grown this business over the past 20 years, I assume they know what they are doing. The people behind LC have expanded this tool far beyond my expectations over the past 20 years.

For people for whom certainty is their concern the tools of Microsoft and Apple and Android might be the determining factor. After all "no-one got fired for buying IBM". That then morphed into "no-one got fired for buying Microsoft".

Even a business that doesn't go bust can destroy someone's investment. I was a Lotus Notes developer 20 years ago. I watched how IBM bought a product decades ahead of all competitors (the original max-security, replicatable, NOSQL database). Notes was hated for many of the reasons "professional" developers hate LC -- easy on-ramp, cross-platform, not Microsoft, not Apple. After 25 years IBM ended up selling the entire stable of Notes-related technologies to an Indian company. Maybe the Indian company can do what IBM couldn't. But they may also change the pricing so that it doesn't suit many customers.

Apple used to produce an incredible programming tool called WebObjects, so advanced that 25 years ago it cost $50,000 for a license (that would be like $300,000 per license now). It could produce apps based on an entity model and a set of rules. But it was written in Objective-C and no-one was using Objective-C. So Apple switched to Java and reduced the license to $600. Nope. Still no-one used WebObjects. So they made it free and open source. And still no-one (except Apple) uses WebObjects. I still hold on to my books about WebObjects and Notes because they are inspirational technologies. Microsoft had the single largest part of desktop app development with Visual Basic. They got rid of it. So VB developers had to jump ship or learn C#.

So in the past 25 years I've watch how Apple and IBM failed with cross-platform technologies, whilst LC is still in the running, and has gone from strength to strength. At the time I first started to learn about Livecode 20 years ago there were a number of competitors around (the only competitor name I remember now is Rebol) - they all failed as businesses.

There's a famous article by a Lisp programmer on how "worse is better", about how C triumphed and Lisp failed. The best technologies often struggle to succeed. What I like about Tcl is that it's nearly Lisp. What I like about Livecode is that it's nearly Smalltalk.

[jacque]

if you have a method that calls a method that calls another that crashes, not only can you can you see the variables for the current method, but you can switch to any of the calling methods and assess the variables in play there as well as access the values of all controls etc from within the variable window. Can't really do any of that with LC. If you have a handler that calls another that crashes, you can see the crashing handler's variables but (as far as i know) you can't change to the calling handler to assess the variables there.

I'm not sure about crashes, but for normal debugging you can choose any of the calling handlers from the execution contexts popdown button and you'll see all its variables and values in th variable window. You can also just point to any variable in the script and see its value in a tooltip.

[stam]

There's a famous article by a Lisp programmer on how "worse is better", about how C triumphed and Lisp failed. The best technologies often struggle to succeed.

Fair comments and fantastic insights, thank you.

No one is disputing the quality of the company in building and advancing the IDE and language, but at the same time you also make the point that mind-share and impressions, rather than technical merits alone contribute to lasting survival of a platform.

The frustration is expressed in the OP's title: Why is LiveCode not recognized more as an app developer language?
I sympathise with that because the language is both charming and capable and everyone here wants to see the platform prosper. Maybe it is cost-effective to rarely do a promotion to increase your user base, i don't know. But it doesn't seem likely....

[stam]

...for normal debugging you can choose any of the calling handlers from the execution contexts popdown button and you'll see all its variables and values in th variable window. You can also just point to any variable in the script and see its value in a tooltip.

OK, i had no idea, will definitely check that out! Thank you!

[Bernard]

Maybe it is cost-effective to rarely do a promotion to increase your user base, i don't know. But it doesn't seem likely....

I don't know what their business activities are. However, it certainly does not make sense (in a time of cost-per-click or cost-per-impression) for LC Ltd to advertise LC IDE to existing customers There may be advertising that we don't see -- because we're already in their loving embrace.

I haven't paid much attention to what they are doing with Filemaker, but that's branching out using LC technology to meet the needs of programmers of another (long-standing) competitor. Also they are working with some product I've seen referenced here as Kognition. I wouldn't be surprised if they also don't do app development/consulting. I'm just guessing - those are the kinds of non-advertising activities that I'd be doing to cross-fund work in LC.

One of the things I take from the (Tcl) creators of Redis, Sqlite, Fossil is that the effort they put into understanding why Tcl was so much more advanced than so many other programming languages allowed them to go out in the world and invent things that no-one else thought was even possible. That's what I'm trying to do.

[DR White]

Written by stam » Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:18 pm
Yes, everyone wants bug fixes and new features. But it's the company's responsibility to ensure it survives, to be blunt...

Just to be clear, the whole point of me posting this topic was to highlight the fact that if LiveCode does not do a better job in marketing the fact that LiveCode is one of the Easiest, Powerful and Fastest (in terms of programming time - Not instruction execution, although LC needs to always strive for the fastest execution time possible) programming platforms for developing apps, it might find it difficult in funding the resources needed to maintain a quality product or even surviving.

[stam]

...if LiveCode does not do a better job in marketing..., it might find it difficult in funding the resources needed to maintain a quality product or even surviving.

+1

[richmond62]

the whole point of me posting this topic was to highlight the fact that

+1

Although, after banging on for years I wonder . . .

[Bernard]

1. The list of 25 most-used mobile dev languages is not at all accurate. Name me a dozen mobile apps that are pure SQL. If that list was instead a list of "the 25 single languages with which pure mobile apps were built" then Livecode might well be on that list. Not blaming the person who posted the list (who may not understand that the list is bogus), but it's a bit like "when did you stop beating your wife".

2. The majority of those languages listed are open source. One could argue their success comes from their vibrant open source community. What more can LC Ltd do to make people engage with the open source freedom? There are some parts of the Dictionary that would benefit from external help. I wonder how many people have fixed errors they've found in the Dictionary. Whether an open source project has a vibrant community isn't something that anyone can control. Look at what happened to WebObjects.

3. Even when something's open source, it doesn't guarantee success. In addition to WebObjects, I can talk about the history of Zope. Go back 20 years or so and Zope (based on Python) was one of the hottest web application servers. Through a whole series of mistakes, Zope was "dead" by about 2012 (Plone CMS is still built on Zope, about one of only 3 tools that are based on Zope). There was a company where Zope originated and who were even the employer of the creator of Python for a few years (that's how important Zope was to Python). Zope was (and is) an amazing technology that almost no-one uses. If Plone dies, then Zope will die.

So Livecode Ltd were around at a time when IBM was riding high with Notes, when Apple was riding high with WebObjects, when Digital Creations were riding high with Zope. Livecode has gone from strength to strength, while those far bigger companies all failed with those flagship products. Livecode took on mobile platforms (in 2009?) when IBM with 10000x times the resources of LC Ltd finally had Notes apps running (iOS only) in 2019.

Perhaps those who are concerned for the growth of the use of Livecode should be putting some of their time into thinking of things that they can do.

It doesn't do oneself any good to worry about things beyond one's control. Far better either to stop worrying or to put the worrying activity into something constructive. I say this as probably the biggest worrier any of you will ever encounter.

[richmond62]

As LiveCode's website has not changed for a good long time, I do feel that unless they (the company)
pull themselves together they will fall by the wayside soonish.

Albion road (next to the Russians) is not Thistle street, and that is indicative.

Unfortunately as I make almost no money from LiveCode (unless one counts the £700 I made this
year teaching programming classes - of which 30% was BBC BASIC, 30% was chess pieces on the table,
potatoes and so on, and 35% was LiveCode) I have no money currently to invest. And all that £700
went into our fridge except for social security, medical and tax payments.

I did donate some money over the Covid lockdown and assume that paid for bread and cheese, and
I have no particular problem with that idea. But as the Covid thing seems to be on the wane it might
be the time for the LiveCode people to say "Thank you" for all our donations by ensuring that
LiveCode survives . . . not by running hell for leather towards some fancy new features . . . but by
getting into a BIG PUSH to raise awareness of LiveCode.