It has recently come to my attention that some people were offended by my previous post. Hopefully it was a wake up call. Others say that I have tarnished my name in the community. Well, that is your opinion and you are entitled to it. A true friend would tell you if you still had food on your face after a meal, or a booger hanging from your nose. The realization might embarrass you, but how much more embarrassed would you be if you weren’t told? How would you feel if your friend knew, but didn’t tell you. Well my friends, some of you have food, some have boogers, and some have both. 
While you might not like how I said what I did, I still stand by it. If you are a hobbyist user of REAL Studio, you are not necessarily the problem; we all start out as hobbyists. However, if you want to color every other row of a ListBox control, and the first thing that comes to your mind is to post the question “how do I color every other row of a listbox” to the Forum (or NUG), then I’m sorry. You fall into the problem category.
It has been an “unwritten code” since the dawn of programming, that apparently needs to be written down now. When you need to figure something out and can’t, precede your question with what you have already tried.
Back to the ListBox example… if you haven’t looked at the ListBox‘s events (to get an idea of what is going on), checked the language reference (to get more detail), searched the forum (because you couldn’t possibly be the first person to ask such a question could you?), searched the NUG archives (for the same reason), or done a search on Google, well, you haven’t held up your fair share of the bargain. Us “old timers” will come along side of you and help, but we’re not all going to do the heavy lifting for you. It’s the old adage about teaching a man to fish.
Can we have a serious 1 on 1 chat here for a minute? Yes, you bought your copy of REAL Studio. But do you honestly expect it to do everything out of the box? If so, you are kidding yourself. Every programming language that I know about has a vibrant 3rd party ecosystem. Microsoft, as big as it is, does not make every possible control… they let others do it so they can concentrate on the language & IDE. If you really want REAL Studio, the great product that it is, to survive… you are going to need to support the 3rd party ecosystem for REALbasic. And right now, it is very ill. Who makes it ill? The community. When you ask a question, and someone says, it is in “abc plugin” or “xyz encrypted classes”, don’t complain that it costs money or that you don’t have the actual source code. So what? You either couldn’t do it or don’t have the time, and the solution does the job that you need it to do. If you don’t support the 3rd party developers, they will leave because they also have a family to support.
If you want everything to be free, then you should be running Linux and programming in an open source language.
Biblicious
One Response to “Not all Walmart people are bad!”
IMO there was nothing offensive about your previous post – it honestly put forward your frustrations as a professional developer with the current state of affairs with Realbasic. Maybe one could describe it as a “rant” or “venting” but certainly not offensive. The 3rd party ecosystem _is_ very weak.
However, it must also be noted that the Open Source ecosystem for Realbasic is also weak. Consider what is available online – the bulk appears to have been released by users who would be considered “professional” more than “hobbyist”.
Now the dividing line between “professional” and “hobbyist” is blurry anyway. A much more important distinction is between “producers” and “consumers”. Some people create useful stuff, whether for payment or for free. Other people just want solutions handed to them; that is not a problem _so long and they are prepared to put something back_. Either that is with money supporting a professional 3rd party solution environment, or with time and effort supporting an open source environment.
The problem is when the level of parasitic consumers, who reject paid for solutions but either cannot or will not work to support an open source community, gets too high. In that case the whole support community will fade away. Again IMO that has not occurred yet but it could easily do so: those who do not want to use a paid for solution should stop whinging and maybe start an open source project for a free alternative.
Meanwhile Real Software do need to assist the paid-for 3rd Party environment to develop and you’ve already mentioned what you think is needed for that.
By S-Copinger on Feb 27, 2010