Born in 1964 makes him 61
Then I’ll give Xojo as Company 5-7 years…
If he will open source the Compler and IDE the product may live a bit longer, but he already missed the sweat spot where he could set the path and define enviroment and community.
He will not set anything open source. The product and the company will end within the next 5 to 10 years. I guess that is for the todays CEO no problem cause he will be out of business then. But the question is: how he will organize the future. When Xojo ends up then people will loose their licenses within the time and it ends up. Without the license servers it will not be fun. For Xojo the end will come. Possibly the product will live longer as open source. But making the compiler open source would kill the product commercially cause a new IDE will come soon after. Making the IDE open source would not change anything. I strongly believe that they have no interest in open source cause of the commercial situation. Sales ending with open Source. Mostly or at least in their eyes.
For me it would be a good business: they get out of business and I will have to rewrite a feww applications written with Xojo with Java. Neat, I love to do this. Simple, fast. And at that point it ends up.
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Does it have to be cross-platform? If it’s for Linux or Mac you could take a look at Crystal, it makes writing an http server very simple, there is a shard for MariaDB and I think it has the nicest syntax ( similar to Ruby ) I’ve ever encountered in a compiled language.
Yeah there is a claim they have a succession plan
I have my own suspicions about what that is
Either way I dont see things changing there
Doesn’t really matter how long they stick around. It’s moot with Geoff in charge.
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Don’t forget adding Genius to the list :-))
There was a genius around? I missed it? I’m really sad about. But it feels more that somebody abused best practices can’t be a genius. But what do I know about that 
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He’s not part of their core product dev team
At least wasn’t when I worked there
I doubt he is now even with his work on DBKit
Anyone interested in that should read the code before just adopting it
EDITED : fixed typo of WANT to WASN’T
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They dont just ignore them
They actively avoid them from what I’m told
You’re talking about sunk costs and switching costs, and that’s for sure a major factor in deciding to leave Xojo behind.
However, this…
You’ll need to learn another language, that will cost you one year of work to be on the same level you where with Xojo.
…isn’t really true, and with the rise of AI assistants, used in conjunction with a mainstream language that AI assistants know inside and out, I’d even say it’s wildly untrue. Especially if you’re considering using Xojo for iOS and Android apps.
I am an expert Xojo developer with decades of experience, going all the way back to CrossBasic, but believe me when I tell you that I accomplished more in one day using Flutter to build a mobile app than I would have accomplished in weeks (or probably months) trying to learn and use Xojo’s pathetic mobile frameworks.
I mean that very literally: I had a working app after one day using Flutter together with ChatGPT*, an app that was more feature-rich and robust than what I could have built in Xojo with months of effort. (*I’ve since switched most of my AI-assisted work to Gemini, but ChatGPT is still very useful.)
Of course I had not actually learned Flutter or Dart in one day, but over the course of a few weeks, I got up to speed (with the invaluable help of AI tutoring and explaining) to the point where I was comfortable coding things on my own, and to a point where when I asked AI to implement some function or small feature, I could anticipate how the AI was probably going to do it, and I was capable of reviewing what it did and either accepting it, correcting it, or telling the AI how to correct it. And all that learning was done in the course of making the app even better — immeasurably better than it would have been if I’d been using Xojo — and developing additional apps.
There are many excellent reasons to dump Xojo and switch to mainstream technologies, and with AI assistants the learning curve for switching has been dramatically shortened.
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Good luck fixing bugs when all code is really written by AI. It takes about one weekend to learn a new programming language syntax. Learning a new programming framework takes a bit more time.
Hmm, you really believe that AI solves all problems. Congratulations. It does not. Exactly no AI is able to do this. And for me it can help to learn but it helps also to do not best pratice. That saying I can tell you definitely: not for Flutter, C#, C++ or Java this will work. Even with Python there are several problemns when and if it comes to complex problems. So yes, you can use AI but it is a bad Idea to learn a language. Do it, it is your problem later. Not mine. I am programmer since nearly 40 years and I think I have enough experience how to learn languages. AI is not the path of learning. While you have no Idea what you are doing at that moment. It is a dangerous try.
To get the real experience to be a professional programmer in Flutter/Dart, Java, C#, Go and other environments will cost a year even with ChatGPT. You can go another way. Then AI gives you how you can do stuffs and you have no Idea what you are doing. That’s not as brilliant as it sounds.
Thanks, Captain Obvious. I never said all code was really written by AI — that would be really dumb — and I explicitly said it takes longer than one day to learn a new programming framework; it took a few weeks for me to get a handle on Flutter (which is probably less time than it would have taken me to get a handle on the hot garbage mobile frameworks of Xojo), and then it became just a matter of constantly expanding my knowledge.
And, by the way, fixing bugs is also something that is easier with the assistance of AI, not to mention way easier when you have much better tooling than Xojo provides.
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I know very well where and how AI assistants are useful and where they aren’t.
If you think AI assistants can’t accelerate your learning, you really couldn’t be any more wrong.
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Can, yes. But the basic skills you should have, to learn a language.
Yeah, I get that. But did you miss the part where I said I’ve been programming for decades? Not just with Xojo, but with at least a dozen other languages/frameworks as well. I thought we were talking about experienced programmers not wanting to switch away from Xojo because of the learning curve involved? My point is that AI assistants make that learning curve drastically shorter. I certainly (obviously) wasn’t saying you can just use AI to do everything, or that you don’t need to learn the framework at all, or that you don’t need to already know sound software architecture and coding practices.
Yes, for you that works. For others not. Exactly that’s the problem. And that is what I said. Nothing else. I have no doubts that you can do that and you have the experience. But many others don’t have. Them I meant when I wrote that.
i also was able to write multiple original mobe apps in flutter, very quickly, using ai assistants. i don’t like flutter, and i definitely consider myself a flutter n00b, but that’s not the point.
i’ve also gone through this with flutter. some things are definitely frustrating, but it is doable, including patching packages to change the way they worked. the combination of help from various ai models and slowly ramped-up understanding, as time moved got me there.
it might take a year to become an expert. i think it probably takes more like five years. the difference is that you are learning and being productive at the same time. the curves are different. the learning curve is flatter, but the productivity curve is steeper.
Doing production with learning toghether works but not in dephts: you’ll reach out to walls of missing knowledge. And you may need to get more knowledge of technologies around, ecosystem and so on.