Maybe that is when you noticed it, but I have being looking for Xojo Jobs for Years (just as a stat) and havent found a single one listed in like 5+ years.
I think that xojo stopped being taken seriously when they made the “New framework” (and ios), huge waste of resources on doing something “new” with little value, limited and filled with bugs while forgeting about their main targets.
Api 2 was just the proof that some “special” people can make the same mistake twice expecting a diferent outcome.
Unfortunately 20/20 hindsight says the Xojo framework was a wasted effort
It modernized so much that it is what underlies many of the updates to things like folder items and newer / better string functionality that have happened in subsequent years
So its not gone away - just disguised as “updates to the API 1 framework”
There were other benefits but I wont recount them since its a moot point now
Probably THE biggest things was it was 100% OPTIONAL
So people could transition their code at their leisure - or never if that suited them
And that is how they should have done ALL of it, Preserving the framework, the keywords and improving the underlying workings istead of pretending users to rewrite their apps.
There are reasons that course was NOT chosen
Like possibly introducing breaking changes that are silent (folder item for instance)
Or TEXT, where you could not use it as a generic bucket of bytes or textual data
That weirdness of STRING was split explicitly
And it was all namespaced - deliberately so unused portions of the framework could be optimized out thereby reducing the app size
That doesnt happen in the current framework
So the next control they introduce might just take over a name you’ve already used for your own custom implementation. This happened when they renamed StaticText to Label and many people had used a static text and NAMED it label in their layouts
Suddenly they had to rename every last instance
The Xojo framework would have prevented that
But those reasons are all moot now since Xojo has decided to go back to “everything global all the time”
The new framework was OPTIONAL so it AND the existing API’s both got regular bug fixes & improvements
A lot of API 2 IS still API1 code in the C/C++ code - you and I just dont happen to directly use that C/C++ code. It’s wrapped into Xojo code in the framework.
Think of it like a library of declares. You dont call the declares directly, but the Xojo api that exposes the relevant call to your code. (masOSLib, Win32 Declare Library, etc are ALL this style)
So if they fix a bug in the underlying C code its VERY likely that the API 1 version of the code AND the API 2 version of the code both get fixed
The Xojo framework was actually, in many cases, brand new C/C++ code not just a rehash of existing code like a bunch of API 2 has been
EDIT : And at this point it matters not since Xojo is deprecating that framework
Give it a few more years and Ai will write everything directly in machine language, so I would not worry. A year or so after that programmers won’t be required.
10 years after that AI will decide humans arnt required
Yeah it was said a bit tongue in check , however I do think they will significantly reduce the manual work we do in many areas of business.
I see this already , I use a local GPT to document my code and it does a really good job of understanding it and writing out charts.
Wonder how good it would be at writing instructions lol not there yet I expect!
I use PHPStorm from JetBrains which has built in AI. It friggin rocks.
It’ll make amazing suggestions and sometimes write exactly what I was trying to think of.
When I refactor code where the pattern repeats, I pretty much just hit return tab, return tab as it auto completes.
I’m also using it more to create functions which it gets right most of the time.
The other day I needed a shell script to zip backups. It grabs the last folder, alphabetically, then zip it to the root of a drive, then moves it to a folder of zips when done. And then it deletes the first x files, alphabetically, leaving at least 7 zips.
On top of all that, you can ask it to optimize code too.
It really feels like a super specific web browser… I can’t imagine not having it anymore. IT’s not perfect, but omg it’s helpful.
If Xojo doesn’t have enough resources to maintain all their targets, the compiler and the IDE, I honestly don’t see them being able to create a reasonable AI function, unless they cut back on something else that already desperately needs some love.
I am really happy that everything is on the AI track right now… this saved us from the Blockchain and NFT Train… and before it was the XYZ train…
Irony off:
Last weekend I’ve played a little bit with ChatGPT. In short, it was utterly disastrous, I had to re-formulating my prompts and ask explicit for basically everything: string conversion, encodings, split and partition differneces (in python) for a given task. After a while the output was quite useable (still missing try…except). At the same time, I would not only have written it down. I would have cleaned my kitchen and my car.
I’ve had extremely good luck with Go. It’s not perfect but it’s close enough to get me pointed in the right direction. I find it a decent learning tool because I generally know what I want to do.
