A good/better way to update a language than what Xojo does

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Interesting discussion from the Golang team on the thought process on updating their random package. Evolving the Go Standard Library with math/rand/v2 - The Go Programming Language

They end up with the following rules:
“…all changes must be rooted in respect for existing usage and users: we must not introduce needless churn, whether in the form of unnecessary changes to an existing package or an entirely new package that must be learned instead.”

“…the v2 package must not leave v1 users behind. Ideally, the v2 package should be able to do everything the v1 package could do, and when v2 is released, the v1 package should be rewritten to be a thin wrapper around v2. This would ensure that existing uses of v1 continue to benefit from bug fixes and performance optimizations in v2.”

These are rules that I wish Xojo had adopted. Instead there’s no respect for existing usage and users, introduced needless churn and old API users were left behind. I very much respect the Golang team with their “compatibility promise”.

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They have no interest that’s it. And people ranting are banned. System. Nothing else. Will that work? I have no Idea.

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As someone has mentioned in these forums they are more interested in new users and not existing users and their work.

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Destroying 20+ years of resources, tutorials, video courses, etc and pointlessly redoing everything without real gain is the equivalent of pulling the rug from under your own feet. Xojo is still in the air but their bottom is getting closer and closer to the ground … very sad to see.

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Heck, I’d already made the conversion to API2 and I STILL had to deal with a renamed event handler (with DisclosureTriangles) in 2024r1. Because consistency, they said.

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You know, all the discussion on this board by former Xojo users boils down to one thing … company management has no clue.

It’s like a cartoon I saw the other day … so many crazy things going on in the world, such that if we really are living in a simulation of some kind, the writers are getting terribly sloppy – the plot lines aren’t even plausible anymore. Everything from RFK Jr’s brain worm to the very existence of cheesy corporate villain Elon Musk was cited. So it is with Geoff. Twenty years ago, Geoff would have been a laughably misguided small company owner, as described by someone trying for their first novel which no publisher would accept. Now Geoffs are all to common. [sigh]

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“our genius” is waiting to jump off in pension in a couple of years… everybody working and hiring at xojo should be aware of this. So I expect no changes, limited ressources while sucking out everything out of xojo.

Maybe in an increased pace with declining customer base. Yesterday there was another 20% sale…

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To be fair, there usually is a May the 4th sale.
On the flip side, 20% isn’t enough to make an impulse buy for me.

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80% of crap is still crap to me.

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Oh…he isn’t that old. For the damages with API 2 he should work…ahh na he will have to do it where it is really warm with much fire around. Maybe he will become the CEO there?

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I think he turned 60 in January

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But why should he go in pension? Possibly he will stay as CEO until he is 80. I doubt that all of us are living until that time…

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Oh I would bet he could have retired years ago
Will he is an entirely different question - I think the answer is no

its my company and I could never walk away from it

I love what I do

or something else

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Absolutly. But what can be done when management take stupid directions despite users shouting that it is a stupid idea???

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Vote with your wallet

Dont pay them for updates “just to support them” (dumbest reason I ever heard) that you then do not use
How many of you have EVER sent Ford money “just to support them” ?
Or Apple ? Or MS ? Or ANY company that is selling you a product ?
Xojo is NOT a charity and people need to stop treating it like one

Buy when you need the new version or new capabilities that you have TESTED (for free) with their latest release

Not before

OR move to something that DOES what you need NOW that doesnt cost 799 $USD

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My Xojo Web 2018 is doing that but…

Every single time I said “Vote with your wallet”, many said “just to support them”, but if you read the full post, many users paid out of fear that the company disapears.

Many users spoilded the management stupid ideas for too long :pensive:

After like 6 years, 2024r2 xojo Web finally looks like a good RC with the control arrays back :rofl: Really tempting to move the old web but, it will need a lot of testing and maybe a couple of releases if something is not working.

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I’ve done that with PureBasic but then I bought a lifetime licence in 2003 and I still get the most recent version > 20 years later.

So I make a donation if they implement a new feature I really wanted ( e.g. MariaDB client or the recently added WebView ) because PureBasic has served me so well.

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fixed it for ya.

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The discussion turns around the point that the concept of Xojo is good but not the stuffs they make from it. It is a couple of wrng decisions which are driving people crazy and at the same time it is so that the people behind having their own behavior with people ranting about the problems they have to release professional software. So what. They decide what they want to decide and they do what they want. And they have enough customers to stay alive. In their eyes they do everything right and there is no error in their strategies. They believe in their policy and that they are completely right. There is no chance to change it. Accept Xojo like it is or pass. There is no third option. There is in truths no discussion. Mr. CEO decides and all others have to accept. That is not a democratic community deciding the future of Xojo. It is his company and he decides. If it is acceptable or not, Mr. CEO is the leader and everybody can follow or pass away from their community.

In this situation people need to decide. There is no hope that they will do that different. Even if the CEO will retire somewhen. While the next one can only do the same job. And he will react like Mr. CEO today reacts and he will be selected by the todays CEO and not by the comminity of the staffs of the company.

Many people believing that there will be one day in far away future a big change in direction of the customers. But I have a news. Why should that be? The System runs like it is. So there is no need to change the policy. As long as people buying Xojo and prolonging Xojo there will not be any problem. Beside the situation now there can be the day they will not have enough people buying that stuff. Then it will not change anymore cause there is no substance to change anything from that day on. The last one switches the light off and closes the door. That’s it.

And there is the next risk. The day will come. After that day there is no chance anymore to hold Xojo alive. It will end then from one day to the other without any warning. The risk behind: you will be there with your sourcecodes then without a compiler running. I do not believe that anybody will set it open source or anything else. It will disappear and end up. Nothing more.

The big part is: nobody can say when this will be. Tomorrow, in 5 years, in 20 years. But it is not like Java where I can say okay, no problem, we have enough vendors there will be a big chance that after oracle will die azul or bell-sw will take care of it. And it is open source. The difference behind: even if they are crashing: your code is still running and you can still develop on that base.

So this discussion should stop while there is no discussion from the view of the CEO. And exactly that people need to learn. Buying one next subscription after the other will not help in any wise to work when it is ended. Change to languages with a broad userbase. Java, C#, Kotlin all are better than what you have now.

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Xojo always had potential, I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it, a dedicated and hardworking individual can create products 90% on par with 1st party tools. However that workload is ridiculous and quite frankly unnecessary.

1Password for instance could have easily been built in Xojo, but there is a reason as to why they didn’t use Xojo. Electron, while ugly is better known and because of that, it’s has a larger audience and therefore is better supported.

The CEO of Xojo doesn’t understand why Xojo’s market has been steadily decreasing over the decades, his attempt to fix it, was to change the language, why would this encourage people to buy his product, I’ll never know, but he bet everything on it and lost.

That single decision illustrated, exactly why Xojo has repeatedly failed to grow and the ramifications caused tremendous shrinkage. The CEO doesn’t understand how to grow the Xojo market. Their latest attempt is on the right track, listening to feedback that we filed upto a decade ago, but at this point, I think it’s too little, too late.

I was recently (2022) presented the opportunity to review Xojo for Mac publications, but I passed, because I didn’t feel a could give a balanced review of the product. This led to Xojo NOT being reviewed and losing that marketing opportunity.

While this all sounds very sour, and I am very sour over the way Xojo has treated us, it’s becoming more and more of a bad memory. I’ve been sick recently and unable to work for a while, when I returned, Swift came naturally, but having to add a workaround to Sleep Aid (still done in Xojo for the time being) for a bug in Sonoma 14.4.1, was hard work…

Xojo is certainly NOT low code, and they should stop advertising that they are.

Addendum: I have accessed Apple of doing the same thing, and to a large extent, they are. However I must point out that Apple recently investigated a bug report of mine over SwiftUI and they found no bug, but they did take the time to provide me a worthy workaround and after looking at all of my submitted code, the engineer even took the time to provide some tips, all of which I am deeply appreciative of.

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