The imp of the perverse

[Alain Farmer]

Hello Pierre and y'all,

> Perhaps is it ways to code abstactions in C, Lisp
> or Smalltalk. Probably is it many more natural to
> do this in using an xTalk. It's just the reason i
> use, instead of any other tool each time it's 
> possible, an xTalks to build my apps. Are there
> any others, here, doing same for the same reasons ?

I refer to this as being in my "zone". Many others
refer to it as "flow". Whatever you call it, it's an
awesome experience, that can only be obtained after a
long quest for knowledge and continuous mastery that
takes years to achieve. You think of a problem and,
voila, the solution pops up into your mind as if by
magic. Someone describes the symptoms, and you
spontaneously *know* exactly what the problem is AND
how to fix it, even when the cause-effect relationship
is not evident at all and/or even if this problem has
never been encountered before.

It's a proven fact that most programmers become
notably attached to the first language they learned.
Kind of like a chick (baby duck) which bonds with
whatever thing is the FIRST that it sees. For many of
us xTalkers, our 1st experience with programming was
scripting HyperTalk. Only natural, therefore, that it
seems so "natural" to us.

OTC, I don't believe that languages are all the same
in terms of ease of learning, daily use, power, etc.
Low-level languages are more powerful, but their ease
of use & their steep learning curve are very
prohibitive. They presume that software is to be
"engineered" and that all needs/specs/etc must be
established before coding. Real life is seldom that
straightforward though. I believe, along with lots of
new "Agile" developers, that this old unrealistic
approach is obsolete. Moreover, I believe that we have
reached a point where our micros provide us with
enough power to dedicate some of this capacity to
making the software/systems easier to craft. Easy
enough for casual developers. With xTalk, for ex, we
don't have to declare the type of our variables before
execution of the handler per-se, or casting from one
type to another during execution. We also don't have
to worry about RAM management. And a lot of other
low-level annoyances that distract us from the goal of
the program/stack.

Consider the ease with which we can deploy our stacks
on all the relevant platforms (Win, Mac, Linux, UNIX,
etc). Porting from one platform to another is hell
otherwise. You have to be very familiar with all the
ins and outs of both/all the platforms. Coming from a
Mac background, I find the propect of fiddling aroung
with win's DLLs & such is a daunting one to say the
least. But there's no need to know or deal with *any*
of it when using MC/RR; not even any rescripting or
reconfiguring ... nada ... just deploy it as-is.
Awesome!

For speed, code-hiding, functionalities not provided
by the xTalk, the [casual] developer can develop small
code snipets in Pascal, C or other languages. I am
referring to XCMDs of course. Not a piece a cake for
mom-and-pop, that's for sure, but they are still far
simpler to make than full-fledged programs in the same
languages. You only have to learn/add what you need,
as you need it, and many are already available in the
HC community.

Okay, that's it. I will leave it at that.

xTalks are the best for most of us!  ;-)

Alain Farmer

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