Livecode vs Other Cross Platform Development Tools

[FourthWorld]

What Russell_Willis means is that there is no showcase for livecode and he has a good point there.

Yes, that was one of Russell's points and has been addressed at length in earlier posts. In summary:

1. The "LiveCode Stories" section is available from the main top-level taxonomy, though it might benefit from having the name change to something less ambiguous like "LiveCode Showcase".

2. The "Stories" page currently has a JavaScript issue which prevents it from loading on some systems.

Both of those were reported to the core team over the weekend.

The main advantage of livecode is its simplicity but when it comes to game development there are so many engines out there dedicated to game development that are MUCH simpler than livecode. Plus the absence of features like a physics engine leaves livecode out of the question when it comes to game dev. I have spend some time creating games with livecode and i must say it is a pain, but when it comes to application development it is superior to any other engine out there.

True, as Oliver noted above.

For example XCode is a wonderful development system, and among scripting language Python is perhaps the world's most popular. But neither is the go-to choice for game development, because as general-purpose languages they provide much flexibility but lack the specific support for delivering games as efficiently as tools restricted to such use cases can provide.

I don't believe any single language can be the best possible choice for all possible types of applications. Indeed, that's why we have so many languages to choose from.

LiveCode strikes a good balance of learnability and flexibility for a wide range of apps, but no matter how much we may enjoy it for the work we do it isn't the most powerful option for all things that can be imagined.

We do have a number of developers in our community shipping games with it now, and when the 2D physics engine is rolled out the number and variety of games will increase.

But even then it won't do what Unity 3D does, or all of the things all other tools do, so it's always helpful to review requirements carefully and choose the best tool for the job at hand.

There is no magic pony; no single tool can do all possible things best.

[zaxos]

I started making a game engine for livecode a while ago, it is possible and not extremely complicated in my opinion. People choose livecode because of its simplicity, experienced developers either choose more advanced languages or they oversee livecode because they misunderstand "Simple" with "No good enough". At first glance even i though livecode isn't up for the task i had in mind, i now know it does, thats why the showcase is so important, people need to see what livecode is capable of.

[Russell_Willis]

Thanks all.

I think the conclusions are that the website is a mess and they need a decent editor to revamp it.

1) I can't discover what the latest version of LiveCode is and what its features are. (There's a lot of "Coming Soon!" stuff floating about, but this could be vaporware for all I know.)

2) There are no clear examples of apps that show what can be done with whatever the current stable release of LiveCode is – if these examples are in the LiveCode stories section well I just checked and that section is still down despite the webmaster being notified.

3) As HTML 5 support is "coming later in 2015" according to the website, so I guess that err... well who knows?

4) As we need HTML 5 support and the ability to create game activities within our course we won't be choosing LiveCode. I take the point that LiveCode may be the better choice for other purposes but my experience of trying to figure out what LiveCode offers has put me off the whole dev platform, even for other things – and I say this as a long-time xTalk fan and a backer of the Kickstarter.

[FourthWorld]

Thanks all.

I think the conclusions are that the website is a mess and they need a decent editor to revamp it.

It can definitely use some taxonomy refinement (too few sites budget for a good card sort test), but at least they have one up on the other site you were looking at where half of the main nav buttons at the top don't respond to clicks at all.

1) I can't discover what the latest version of LiveCode is and what its features are. (There's a lot of "Coming Soon!" stuff floating about, but this could be vaporware for all I know.)

The first menu in the top nav panel labeled "LiveCode" offers links to descriptions of features tailored for various use cases, including Business, Development, and Education - the Developers page is a good overview for those making commercial applications:
https://livecode.com/products/livecode- ... evelopers/

Feature rollouts happen at a quick pace with LiveCode, so the best way to get details on features specific to a given version is to see the Release Notes available for each build - this is accessible from the Download page:
http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/

If you have questions about any of the features in development that you saw flagged with "Coming Soon" I'd be happy to point you to current status of those.

2) There are no clear examples of apps that show what can be done with whatever the current stable release of LiveCode is – if these examples are in the LiveCode stories section well I just checked and that section is still down despite the webmaster being notified.

As you know, I'd sent my notification over the weekend. On Monday morning they confirmed that they were already aware of the issue, and as of Monday night the page loads well:
https://livecode.com/customers/

3) As HTML 5 support is "coming later in 2015" according to the website, so I guess that err... well who knows?

The first Developer Preview release of the HTMl5 export option was delivered on schedule in July 2015:
https://livecode.com/ready-html5-deploy ... t-preview/

This is still in beta so they're not yet advertising it as a finished feature, though they do make blog posts often about it to keep us abreast of its development:
https://livecode.com/search-results/?q=html5

4) As we need HTML 5 support and the ability to create game activities within our course we won't be choosing LiveCode. I take the point that LiveCode may be the better choice for other purposes but my experience of trying to figure out what LiveCode offers has put me off the whole dev platform, even for other things – and I say this as a long-time xTalk fan and a backer of the Kickstarter.

If HTML5 export is a must-have now LiveCode may not be the best option at the moment, as that feature is still in development.

Speaking of, I was hoping to learn more about how Cocos translates its C++-based engine to JavaScript, but I couldn't find a description of that on their web site or in their source repository. Do you know where I might learn more on that?

All of us in the LiveCode community appreciate your support in the Kickstarter campaign, and I hope you'll find LiveCode satisfying and enjoyable for other projects down the road.

[RossG]

Had a look at the Cocos site and saw a mention of the
C language.

For those who haven't been around long enough this
seems a good time to remind anyone thinking of using
C that it was written as a joke.

Brian was also responsible for pitching this lack of I/O as a feature: it allowed us to describe the language as "truly portable". When we found others were actually creating real programs with A, we removed compulsory type-checking on function arguments. Later, we added a notion we called "casting": this allowed the programmer to treat an integer as though it were a 50kb user-defined structure. When we found that some programmers were simply not using pointers, we eliminated the ability to pass structures to functions, enforcing their use in even the simplest applications. We sold this, and many other features, as enhancements to the efficiency of the language. In this way, our prank evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C.

http://www.stokely.com/lighter.side/unix.prank.html

Either Kernighan or Ritchie admitted as much in an interview
with a computer magazine but refused to let them publish it.

The story was that as young programmers with families to
support they found it difficult to get work because there
were so many programmers being turned out by the
universities. I believe that in those days it was mainly
Cobol or Fortran which is so simple that just about anyone
could do it. So as a joke they decided to devise a language
which would be so difficult (or was it impossible?) to get
right that it would provide plenty of work for everyone.

I must admit that they succeeded in their aim of producing
a "make work" language.

I have read stories of large projects using C which were never
completed. The complexity of the language defeated even the
best programmers.

One joke too many which must have held back the development
of computing by many years and wasted countless hours of time.

Keep in mind that the whole idea is that you're not supposed to
be able to produce anything that works with this abhorrent
mish-mash of colons, brackets and braces.