Re: LEGO kit
Posted: Tue May 06, 2014 7:12 pm
Thanks Peregrine.
I remember playing around with a Demo of labVIEW in 1994:
http://www.ni.com/try-labview/
and thinking:
1. That's very clever if you are not particularly interested in programming-qua-programming, but want to connect lab instrumentation to work together.
2. While that is very clever, the nature of it might at a certain point prove limiting.
I should, perhaps bung in a bit of autobiography here (because everybody's path influences their opinions later on).
Having a history of "traditional" programming languages: FORTRAN, BASIC, PASCAL
Suddenly, in 1993, I was faced with a Macintosh LC475 and Hypercard.
This was a conceptual shock!
Then somebody at SIUC (where I was studying) lobbed me a Demo disk of labVIEW and asked for a 500 word squib on the thing [ Dr Thomas Thibeault: Mormon Bishop and boss of the
Applied Linguistics Department computer lab ]. Why did he do that? Because, as of 1994, in Carbondale, Illinois, in the Linguistics department, I, at least superficially, appeared to know
more about computers than anybody apart from Dr Thibeault; and, having already developed several CALL titles with Hypercard (sadly, later lost in the "backup" system of SIUC), I knew
quite a lot about how students responded to graphical presentations on a computer screen,
labVIEW is limited and limiting; as are almost all drag-n-drop systems. Unlike labVIEW and its ilk, however, a drag-n-drop system bolted on . . .
OK pause here while I explain why I have chosen to use the phrase "bolted on" . . .
Because I believe that building a whole new GUI on-top the Livecode engine would be both a huge mistake and too much trouble for any possible gain.
Therefore I would rather that, as well as our current "revMenubar" and "revTools" stacks that, like Asterix's village, we "know and love" we should have
a visual drag-n-drop interface stack (if, indeed we really need one at all ?????) that can be flipped into and out of: so at any one time an end-user can choose
whether they want to use the 'standard' interface or the 'LEGO kit' interface.
I remember playing around with a Demo of labVIEW in 1994:
http://www.ni.com/try-labview/
and thinking:
1. That's very clever if you are not particularly interested in programming-qua-programming, but want to connect lab instrumentation to work together.
2. While that is very clever, the nature of it might at a certain point prove limiting.
I should, perhaps bung in a bit of autobiography here (because everybody's path influences their opinions later on).
Having a history of "traditional" programming languages: FORTRAN, BASIC, PASCAL
Suddenly, in 1993, I was faced with a Macintosh LC475 and Hypercard.
This was a conceptual shock!
Then somebody at SIUC (where I was studying) lobbed me a Demo disk of labVIEW and asked for a 500 word squib on the thing [ Dr Thomas Thibeault: Mormon Bishop and boss of the
Applied Linguistics Department computer lab ]. Why did he do that? Because, as of 1994, in Carbondale, Illinois, in the Linguistics department, I, at least superficially, appeared to know
more about computers than anybody apart from Dr Thibeault; and, having already developed several CALL titles with Hypercard (sadly, later lost in the "backup" system of SIUC), I knew
quite a lot about how students responded to graphical presentations on a computer screen,
labVIEW is limited and limiting; as are almost all drag-n-drop systems. Unlike labVIEW and its ilk, however, a drag-n-drop system bolted on . . .
OK pause here while I explain why I have chosen to use the phrase "bolted on" . . .
Because I believe that building a whole new GUI on-top the Livecode engine would be both a huge mistake and too much trouble for any possible gain.
Therefore I would rather that, as well as our current "revMenubar" and "revTools" stacks that, like Asterix's village, we "know and love" we should have
a visual drag-n-drop interface stack (if, indeed we really need one at all ?????) that can be flipped into and out of: so at any one time an end-user can choose
whether they want to use the 'standard' interface or the 'LEGO kit' interface.