This is still a bit of a touchy subject in the RB community, so it may be a mistake in writing this blog posting. But, touchy subjects don't scare me! The topic I have in mind is the application builder changes that happened on Windows a few releases back. The one where REALbasic went from building single-file executables to building applications into a folder including plugin shared libraries. I discussed this topic a bit previously, but feel it needs a bit more. Especially since I still see it generating posts in the forums and on the mailing lists. I covered
November 2008 Archives
When I first started working for REAL Software, I knew nothing about REALbasic. In fact, I had never even tried the product out before I started working for them (I had no access to a Mac, and at the time, that was the only platform the IDE would run on). So I had quite a crash course in REALbasic my first few weeks there. I knew I was asking all kinds of "stupid" questions, and all the engineers had an extreme amount of patience with my learning process. Fast forward a few years to a time when I was feeling
This topic keeps coming up in various places under various guises, so I figured it'd be worth talking about. Let me make my stance very clear: REALbasic does not need, and should not have some form of explicit type specification that is inline with a numeric literal. It's a bad idea for the language, and I hope it never happens. Hopefully there's no misunderstanding my stance now. ;-) For starters, REALbasic made a mistake when adding all the fancy new numeric datatypes. At the time, it didn't feel like a mistake -- it felt like the right direction to go.
For plenty of people, it is natural to keep multiple versions of REALbasic around at the same time. For instance, if you have a project that's been developed in 2007r1, you may want to keep that IDE version around to continue working while you scope out a newer version of the IDE for a different product. Unfortunately, on Windows, this has recently become a problematic situation. Older versions of REALbasic (I forget which, exactly -- but I believe it's 2007r3 and older) had a bug in them where empty "multi-strings" in the registry would cause a crash. What's more, the
"Syntax Error" is basically the compiler's version of throwing its hands into the air and saying "I dunno what's wrong here, but something's not right!" In an ideal world, you'd never see the cryptic "syntax error" creep into your programs. However, in an ideal world you'd never see "paramErr" or "ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER", etc. At some point in every API designer's lifetime, they fall into this trap and it's just an unfortunate fact that sometimes programming can be obtuse. Thankfully, REALbasic's compiler does a fairly reasonable job of protecting you from nondescript error codes. It's certainly gotten better over the years! Generally
One of the topics which comes up frequently in language design is whether your language is going to be a DSL (domain specific language) or a GPL (general purpose language). Frequently, when you hear language dorks talking about languages, this topic invariably comes up at some point. The current trends seems to be that people want more and more DSLs; that it's going to be the next big frontier. "There's no more room for GPLs" is the argument you most frequently come up against. Hogwash, to both sides. There are no DSL, and there are no GPLs. I claim the
Can blue cheese ever go bad? Why does the BCS rating system still exist when it's so incredibly flawed? Why is the human brain seemingly hard-wired to think that correlation and causation are the same thing? What's so incredibly important about Iowa that our political process seems to continually start there? Why do they call them "round" numbers when they're even? And why do we consider five and three to be "nice, round numbers" when talking about sets? I count #5 and #6 as one question because they both include the phrase "round numbers." ;-)
So I was installing Battlefield 2 the other night, and I ran across a wonderful example of what not to do when designing a user interface. Never mind the odd cropping (you can thank Snipping Tool for that). I'd rather focus on the many silly things happening here. For starters, you'll notice that the caption for the window says "Question." That's a rather worthless caption. What are you questioning? Why should I care? Remember, when you're designing a caption, it should be descriptive. I suppose that in this case, it is in a roundabout manner. However, it might have been
There are some big changes afoot for me, which you may have already heard announced elsewhere. I am no longer working for REAL Software. With the economic situation in the US being what it is, it was difficult for RS to justify having a full-time compiler writer and engineering manager. Those positions have been consolidated into other people's daily duties within the company, and consequently, Nathan and I were laid off. I've had a wonderful run of almost seven years with REAL Software, and have thoroughly enjoyed all of it. I was blessed to work with an excellent team of
