Richmond wrote:
> On 2.04.2016 18:38, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> Thanks. Yes, Mark Lucas has been doing some outstanding work on
>> SuperCard 4.8.
>
> Well, outstanding is as outstanding does, I really wonder how
> Supercard keeps going in the face of competition of Livecode.
> I know that Supercard has been around for donkey's ages (recall
> playing with it [and finding it rather awkward compared with
> Hypercard 2.4.1] about 20 years ago), but as Macintosh, whichever
> way one looks at things, is a coterie, niche market, a multiplatform
> alternative (pace Livecode) would seem to make it redundant.
One could equally ask about LiveCode in the face of competition from the
nearly-ubiquitous Python. There are so many languages in the world
because each offers something a little different from the others.
Given the similarities between LC and SC, it might seem at first glance
like they do the same thing, and in some respects they do.
But when you spend more time with them, it becomes clear that the
similarities between them are like the similarities between Mac and
Windows: both have overlapping windows and many other nearly identical
GUI elements, but Mac is built by a company that also makes the hardware
so they're able to exercise a bit more control over the experience, one
which its fans feel is more integrated and satisfying.
Similarly, SuperCard has 1/7th of the job that LC has: OS X vs OS X,
Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Linux/ARM, and faceless Server. Not
surprisingly, focused exclusively on 1/7th of the platform coverage,
Mark Lucas has been able to integrate with OS X more smoothly in some
ways than LC can.
SuperCard is a glove wrapped around the hand of OS X, while LC is more
of a platform-independent VM, interfacing with the host OSes in such a
broad range of ways that it has to use more internal code for things SC
can depend on OS X for.
They look similar because both do a good job, but under the hood their
architectures are vastly different, each comprised of good choices but
different because they serve very different goals.
> In a perfect world (which is a silly turn of phrase) Livecode would
> be able to parse just about any file one could chuck at it.
That's the world I hope we're moving toward. And format by format we'll
get there.
Right now most data scientists use Python as their glue language to
wrangle Hadoop, R, and the other parts of their workflow. There's
really no reason they couldn't be using LiveCode in that role, and it
becomes a compellingly self-evident choice once we can move some of that
workflow directly into the language through automated handling of more
formats.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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