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Topic: Where have the BB4W supporters gone? (Read 306 times) |
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admin
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Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Thread started on: Mar 10th, 2014, 10:05am » |
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Once upon a time there were plenty of enthusiastic BB4W users who were keen to support the language, for example in the creation of libraries (e.g. BB4WMAPM), support utilities (e.g. the API Viewer plug-in), documentation (e.g. the Beginners' Tutorial) etc.
But now that enthusiasm seems to have completely evaporated. Here are some examples of attempts to get the BB4W 'community' to help support the language which have failed:
DLGEDITCE (the Community Edition of the Dialogue Editor). At one time that project had at least three active members, but when I recently posted a message here asking for somebody to report on its status, there was not a single reply.
GUILIB (the proposed new library to support the Windows GUI). Despite me publishing a draft specification, and some initial activity, that project appears to have been abandoned because of an unwillingness by interested parties to cooperate.
BB4W version 6. This new version of BB4W, initially developed to support 'LB Booster', is stalled because of the several volunteers who offered to be testers only two have provided any feedback! Most haven't even acknowledged receipt of the Beta version.
BB4W for Linux. A while ago I asked for somebody to help port BB4W to Linux. You might think this is a worthwhile exercise that would attract some interest, but nothing! This is all very disappointing and demotivating.
Richard.
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Malvern
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #1 on: Mar 10th, 2014, 10:12pm » |
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Where indeed?
DlgEdit was updated last month. Members have "moved on."
GUILIB is a closed sub group.
BB4W V6 has not appeared and may never.
Yahoo group is closed. Which is a much more appropriate format than this for occasional readers.
All very disappointing and demotivating.
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admin
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #2 on: Mar 10th, 2014, 11:00pm » |
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on Mar 10th, 2014, 10:12pm, Malvern wrote:| DlgEdit was updated last month. |
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Are we talking about the same thing? DLGEDIT is the utility supplied with BB4W; it was updated with the release of version 5.95a at the end of last year. The utility I was referring to is the 'Community Edition' which went under various names like DLGEDITCE.
Quote:| GUILIB is a closed sub group. |
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GUILIB is a (proposed) library! The 'Developers' sub-group, if that is what you are referring to, is open to anybody who falls into that category. There is an open invitation to join it here.
Quote:| BB4W V6 has not appeared and may never. |
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What is your view? Do you think it should be released, or are you in the camp who believe the risks outweigh the benefits? It's far from a straightforward decision, especially since the compatibility issues have turned out to be more serious than I realised. But either way the beta testers having apparently lost interest is not helpful. 
Quote:| Yahoo group is closed. Which is a much more appropriate format than this for occasional readers. |
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If the Neo interface was even half usable I would re-open the group immediately. I check it every few weeks to see if Yahoo have fixed the more serious bugs, but if anything it's getting worse. I can't use it at all from my main Windows 95 PC; from my Windows 8.1 laptop I can reply to a message by manually editing all the HTML tags back into the characters they represent, but it's a horrendous pain.
I am at a loss to understand why pretty much every other online service (Twitter, Facebook, Conforums, you name it) can manage to provide a browser-independent text editor, but Yahoo can't. It's not rocket science!
As you probably know, I tried to move the Yahoo group membership 'en masse' to Wiggio, but it then transpired that Wiggio has its own issues (principally with the email interface).
Quote:| All very disappointing and demotivating. |
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So, is there no solution? Yours seems to be a counsel of despair. 
Richard.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 10th, 2014, 11:45pm by admin » |
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Kirkkaf13
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #3 on: Mar 11th, 2014, 9:14pm » |
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Hello Richard,
I am also a reader of the basic.programming.org forum, and this reminds me of a recent topic you have participated in regarding the BASIC programming language becoming redundant.
Now I did not post on that forum because as you may have noticed a lot of the users are very immature and like to bash each others opinions.
I would class myself as a very novice programmer and do very little as a hobby but I do have a interest in different languages and how they have matured and changed throughout the years.
I believe the decrease of numbers in BASIC communities is because programmers seem to have a much larger choice of language now days, and programmers are now spread out between ever increasing choices.
Beginners, Indie and hobbyist also seem to be more interested in mobile / tablet devices and a lot of languages have adapted to this demand. Some basic dialects have also jumped on board with support for android and iOS, you will find that these dialects currently have the biggest communities among BASIC.
Here are a few examples;
http://www.monkey-x.com/ (Blitz Basic)
http://www.appgamekit.com/ (TheGameCreators / DarkBasic)
http://www.basic4ppc.com/
http://livecode.com/
All the sites listed above all look very modern and appealing to its users. I think with the right libraries, tools and website/forum overhaul BBC Basic can too have more appeal.
Ideally I would like to help but I do not feel my skills are adequate as of yet.
Kirk
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| « Last Edit: Mar 11th, 2014, 9:17pm by Kirkkaf13 » |
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Malvern
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #4 on: Mar 12th, 2014, 5:33pm » |
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Quote:| The utility I was referring to is the 'Community Edition' which went under various names like DLGEDITCE. |
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Me too. It was in here:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/bb4w/files/Tools/Dialog%20Editor%20Community%20Ed./
Quote:| What is your view? Do you think it should be released |
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Version 6: Certainly. If it is good enough for LB users why would it not be good enough for BB4W? And I have heard the arguments about incompatibility etc. But isn't that the same as say upgrading from XP to Windows 7 or Vista to Windows 8. Things might not be the same and the user could choose to upgrade or not. And as some have in the past go back to an earlier version.
Quote:| If the Neo interface was even half usable I would re-open the group immediately. |
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Well we don't know what it looks like to you or what your criterion of "half useable" means, but it did seem a pretty big snub to those that did use it. And all that Wiggio nonsense? I did not even look at that: the site description told me that was not a platform designed to do what we needed.
Quote:| So, is there no solution? |
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Well let's face it WIN32 is a platform that is past it's prime. It is still supported by Microsoft and may well be around for another 10 years, but it is not the future. Similar comments are being made about decline at Liberty Basic and PowerBasic which again have one owner or lead programmer, only support limited platforms and are primarily WIN32. When the prime developer gets bored or dies or finds something better to do then a decline is inevitable unless it moves on to 64 bit platforms at least.
It seems to me that you got bored with BB4W and to be promoting LB quite frequently so I don't see why you should berate your customers for not supplying the parts that BB4W is missing. Or expect them to, realistically.
I still enjoy BB4W for it's simplicity and power, but I know that some younger people have moved to another BASIC which has 64 bit support and is being actively developed and is European.
What can BB4W offer? Well it is a great beginners platform which can do quite magnificent things in the right hands. But nobody is going to make a career out of programming in BBC BASIC so talented programmers are going to move to other things, inevitably. You are probably going to quibble over "Nobody" by quoting somebody that has. Don't! That kind of response is really, really, annoying.
Also don't be so critical of those that do offer help or submit programs. I am pretty sure that several of the major contributors from days gone by left for that very reason. Indeed I have had to raise my eyebrows at some of the replies you have given. And your choice of words is often quite harsh, whether you see than or not.
So how do you not lose more followers? If you were serious about that then here are some suggestions.
You have unique knowledge about how BB4W works and why. Perhaps an occasional series about those. It could be in the wiki or a corner here or both. For me I am at a loss about things like anonymous structures and all that indirection with parameter blocks and the like.
Secondly, this forum like the previous ones has become an Ask Richard page. I am sure you would like more contributors so I would suggest that you back off unless someone does actually Ask Richard. Let others give answers. I know lots of them will be crap, and that is OK so long at it gets sorted eventually. You can certainly step in if it doesn't get resolved and again I would appeal that you do it in a friendly way. We are not at school any more, and indeed today's teachers would soon be out of a job if they replied as you typically do. I know, I teach part time and haven't been fired, yet! Putting peoples back up does not encourage a second or subsequent submission. It closes down further involvement.
Thirdly I am sure that in developing things like LBB you developed little routines that are useful. Why not publish these? Ways of parsing lines, verifying if something is a variable or not, I don't know, but there must be something in the thousands of lines of code developed over the last two years that would be of general use. Again if you do it as a series you might keep people tuning in and perhaps experimenting.
I am sure that that might be quite a bitter pill to swallow. I am a fan of BBC BASIC but like so many we learned that as young people when home computers were new and exciting and have now grown much older and one hopes wiser. I doubt if I would have learned BBC BASIC in today's environment. What is important to youth is how to program their mobile devices or for hobbyists thing like the RaspberryPi. I would probably start trying, say, Python and of course it's free. And there are all the Google offerings.
So who are today's target BB4W users? It might be newly retired folks that need a hobby and remember there was a BBC BASIC, and only want to program say a contact list or simple pension calculator and so on. Schools? Perhaps some. It would be good in schools but probably politically unacceptable for a teacher not to be using "modern" languages that would give students a way into employment.
And some form of easy GUI development is essential for all of that.
Since you don't seem to be up to date with what is in the Yahoo files there have been some interesting things there on an attempt to convert Resource scripts to BB4W. That might be useful.
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admin
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #5 on: Mar 12th, 2014, 6:59pm » |
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on Mar 12th, 2014, 5:33pm, Malvern wrote:| Version 6: Certainly. If it is good enough for LB users why would it not be good enough for BB4W? |
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LBB uses only a fraction of the capabilities of BB4W v6, so there could be major bugs or unimplemented features without having any impact at all. Indeed that's precisely why LBB has been built with BB4W v6 for something like a year, before the modifications were complete and long before any detailed testing was carried out.
Quote:| And I have heard the arguments about incompatibility etc. But isn't that the same as say upgrading from XP to Windows 7 or Vista to Windows 8. |
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The incompatibilities between BB4W v5 and v6 are greater than those between Windows XP and 8. But even if that were not the case no previous upgrade of BB4W (going right back to version 1.00a) has introduced incompatibilities comparable to those that version 6 does, so we are talking about breaking entirely new ground.
It is important not only to consider the risks (primarily of incompatibility, but of bugs as well) but also the benefits. 64-bit integers and 'huge' (>65535 byte) strings, which are the only significant new features in v6, are likely to be of little or no benefit to the majority of BBC BASIC programmers.
Quote:| it did seem a pretty big snub to those that did use it. |
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Large numbers of Yahoo groups closed and moved elsewhere because of the Neo fiasco, so what I did was in no way unusual at the time. At least I have retained the possibility of re-opening the group, which most did not.
Quote:| And all that Wiggio nonsense? I did not even look at that: the site description told me that was not a platform designed to do what we needed. |
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Wiggio addresses exactly our needs, and was chosen carefully. If it hadn't been for the non-compliance with some conventions regarding email delivery it would have been an ideal replacement.
Quote:| It seems to me that you got bored with BB4W and to be promoting LB quite frequently so I don't see why you should berate your customers for not supplying the parts that BB4W is missing. Or expect them to, realistically. |
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Why should BB4W be so different from LB in that respect? Look at FreeForm, LB Workshop, Alyce's Restaurant etc. as examples of the degree of support provided by users. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think that BB4W users could do something comparable.
Quote:| teachers would soon be out of a job if they replied as you typically do. I know |
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I have never been a teacher, and I wouldn't want to be (my wife was)! This is a technical forum where I expect to give technical replies to technical queries. It's hard enough trying to frame a complete and unambiguous response without having to worry about the 'style'!
Quote:| You have unique knowledge about how BB4W works and why. |
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Anything which I consider to be relevant I have already published on the Wiki. If I ever write code which relies on "unique" knowledge I try to remember to add the information there, so that (at least in principle) there's nothing that only I am able to do.
Quote:| Thirdly I am sure that in developing things like LBB you developed little routines that are useful. |
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Not that I'm aware of.
Quote:| Since you don't seem to be up to date with what is in the Yahoo files |
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Well, I certainly wouldn't expect any new files to be uploaded there. One of the major advantages of Wiggio over Yahoo is that files can be downloaded by anybody, not just members, so that's the obvious place to put contributions (as has for example been the case for the recent developments in CLASSLIB). A message can be posted here with a direct link to the file, which is very convenient.
Richard.
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Malvern
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #6 on: Mar 13th, 2014, 12:31am » |
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What I am hearing is that all that can be done has already been done.
Quote:| If I ever write code which relies on "unique" knowledge I try to remember to add the information there, so that (at least in principle) there's nothing that only I am able to do. |
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So SYS @fn(x) is something I should recognize? I don't!
And perhaps also just for me, you, (or anyone who knows, it doesn't have to be Richard, but he does seem to like them), could tell what an anonymous structure is and why. And then how it might be used to advantage over whatever it is that it is better than. Maybe it needs a new topic header for that. I'll look for the technical part and try to ignore any style issues.
As an aside, I am a technical type and once thought that all this people stuff was crap. I went on a "Facilitator's" course where psychologists told us how people react etc. and I was still skeptical. Then we were video taped in situations that we did not know related to the course and given challenges and manipulated inputs. Well, you know what, we reacted exactly like we had been told a couple of days earlier. Presentation and "style" is very important. People react in predictable ways with a little bit of quantum randomness thrown in. I am so sorry that you dismiss it so readily. It is what makes groups cohesive or fractured and dysfunction more than anything else. I was supposed to manage teams and that insight was very useful. A small change can bring great rewards. Your wife can probably point you to some books on the subject since teacher training has a lot to say about it. And it is nothing new. What makes a good teacher? It's not just the content you know. Indeed pretty much all the teachers have the knowledge, but only some teach well.
And I thank you for reading this, even if it doesn't sway you. But you did ask where had all the supported gone. I know where and why for some of them and I have told you pretty much in the previous posts.
I'll keep peering in and hope for the best. And don't forget those anonymous structures, they seem important to making GUILIB work if I read some earlier posts correctly.
And think on your words on GUILIB
Quote:| unwillingness by interested parties to cooperate. |
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Is there anything in there that relates to team-working? Yes, of course there is. The discussions I saw never got to the point that a team could have done anything. You provided a specification that differed from what others though it should or could be, maybe in ignorance, agreed. And 'required' their buy in. It was never their project, it was yours. That is not how it works but you may not have understood that was what you were doing. Volunteer groups are the most fragile of democracies and take lots of time to nourish. That other language groups have produced significant things is not something you can replicate without leadership, and commitment. So when you posted that you did not think GUILIB would be used anyway and gave a couple of reasons why, YOU killed it. I do wish you would stop blaming others.
Anyhow that is more than enough from me and I am sorry to lecture you. I am just answering your questions as honestly as I know how in the hope that you want to know. And I fully appreciate that you will most likely dismiss most if not all of it. Not an unusual trait! Or maybe take it apart bit by bit and refute it, which is a style that you seem to like. Let me tell you that is a style that really pisses people off in a hurry.
Now I would predict that you are upset by now, right? So the thing to do is NOT reply immediately, indeed wait a week and then think on it again and see if there is anything of use here. One of my techniques is to write a reply down at great length including what I feel. Then throw it in the garbage. It has stopped me doing some very silly things in my career, and some times told me what the real issue was.
And did I mention I am a fan of BB4W.
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ady
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #7 on: Mar 13th, 2014, 11:22am » |
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I'm a big fan of bb4w too
If you want things to change then you will need to do the changing Richard
The older we get the harder it is too, we tend to revert to our basic genetic OS in our more advanced years
The suggestion above of team skills books sounds interesting
We're running out of time too if you're about the same age as me, about 20 good years left? 30? tick tick tick tick
Wouldn't be easy for you but but it is the solution you seek if you want things to flourish
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rtr2
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Re: Where have the BB4W supporters gone?
« Reply #8 on: Jul 26th, 2015, 6:21pm » |
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on Mar 13th, 2014, 12:31am, Malvern wrote:| And perhaps also just for me, you .... could tell what an anonymous structure is |
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Quote:| And don't forget those anonymous structures |
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I didn't mean "anonymous structure", I meant "opaque structure". Sorry about that, but sadly it's just the sort of confusion that can result from my kind of dementia.
Quote:| We're running out of time too if you're about the same age as me, about 20 good years left? 30? |
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Nowhere near.
Richard.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 26th, 2015, 6:23pm by rtr2 » |
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