Everyone who keeps building business software on Xojo does so at their own risk and peril. A risk assessment is always a good idea.
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…or the great new documentation system.
yeah lets not go there
So much is wrong, poorly documented, or just hard to find
For instance I was looking for scrollbar just minutes ago
So I searched the new docs but only put in “scroll”
What was NEVER shown as an option ? DesktopScrollbar
The deprecated Scrollbar was (way way way down the list of results)
This is but one example where API 2 prefixing every last control this way hurts every time you try (autocomplete is another)
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Well Ivan I get what he is saying, if you are dependent on your investors being pleased with their ROI, venture capitalists or not, they can have short-term objectives that are bad for the product. But it cuts both ways. If you eliminate that source of being second-guessed, you still report to your customers, and they can cut off your funds, too. Accountability is not mostly a Bad Thing, if you’re accountable to the right people for the right reasons. “I report to no one” as an un-nuanced brag, is actually a pretty big “tell” and a red flag.
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I really don’t see them open sourcing the software nor honestly do I think that’s the right approach.
I don’t think there’s any reason to suggest Geoff wants to step away from Xojo at this point.
I do think though that should he decide to retire or move on, I would certainly be interested in keeping Xojo Inc as an ongoing concern.
If I had a few spare million burning a hole in my pocket (I don’t) I might be interested in rebooting it under another name (too much bad karma under the present name and it’s a lousy name anyway IMO) but I am sure Geoff would want a lot more $ that would not take into account the massive technical debt that would have to be retired, to the point that much of it would just have to be rewritten from the ground up.
Norm for example mentioned that when he worked on autocomplete, his conclusion at the time was that they were just going about it the wrong way and if true then there is one example of a feature that would have to be tossed and re-done differently, and is therefore useless, if not negative, as part of the value of a sale. I’m sure there are MANY other examples. I’d need to hire a compiler guy, double or triple the dev count, and I suspect in the end all I would be buying is what’s left of the user base and the general concept and maybe, charitably, half the existing code could be reused in a rebooted product.
If it’s not already true, it will likely be true in a few years, that there is so little good will that it would not be all that much different than saying, hey, I think I’ll build a cross platform targeting, single code base framework and IDE tied to a BASIC dialect from scratch. And then I’d have to ask myself, does anyone even really WANT this? It might make more sense to take whatever the code base would teach concerning cross platform targeting (largely anti-patterns, lol) and build a language-agnostic engine that you could use your language of choice with, IDK. Give it C, python Java and .NET bindings and people can pick & choose.
There IS a succession plan in place should Geoff decide to step away or be forced to by an inability to perform his duties
There are some who know what that plan entails
But it does amount to Xojo Inc being run as a going concern
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It’s a concern now and Geoff is still here.
stunningly there IS still a LOT of VB6 code to do something with
And now increasingly VB.NET code looking for love.
But a business model married exclusively to a BASIC dialect, I’m not so sure that’s a great idea. Xojo isn’t syntax-compatible with either VB6 or VB.NET and then there are the bigots who would not sully themselves with any flavor of BASIC. Give it .NET bindings and you open it up to C#, not to mention a dozen other languages the live on the .NET runtime, from MSFT and others, ranging from F# to Eiffel. Give it Java bindings and you open up a whole world there.
And it’s not an either-or, you could continue to support Xojo or other BASICs. IOW the framework could be a cross platform, cross language library that someone could build, say, a Dart front end for if they want, or, the IDE could have a code templating system that could accommodate other languages.
All of this of course is easy to blue-sky here at my desk, I realize it is not just some trivial thing in the Real World.
When I was younger, I had a touch of the ego.
Maybe Geoff’s “oh sh*t” moment is nigh.
That’s the word.
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What is worse than a young fool?
An old fool.
Not everyone outgrows youthful hubris. Some even double down on it.
Another way I’ve heard it said: “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
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I made the go jump too, when I find an issue there is always a work around, and usually just an understanding issue. I got the new version of xojo recently and ran into 3 showstoppers in the first week and go no where with Xojo support.
Gradually moving more and more of my code base to go, and it’s all running hundreds id not thousands of times faster.
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With API 2?
-Karen
I don’t have a view about it because I never had working experience with VB6, coming up as I did through the XBase world instead. The closest I came was VBScript (in classic ASP).
There is a Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace with compatibility functions that can make VB.NET easier to migrate to from VB6, but I never used that either, preferring in fact to avoid it, so for example, Convert.ToInt32() rather than CInt(). I liked VB.NET code that, at times, was just a somewhat more wordy C# without case sensitivity or semicolons. There was no reason to use the legacy functions unless you were porting actual VB6 code, in my view.
But if VB6 maps to Xojo syntactically pretty well out of the box, that could be a good thing.
Oh lord no
But then why
Until/unless the IDE gets moved to API 2 WHY would anyone do it if Xojo isnt going to ?