One question I’ve been asked is why I like REALbasic so much. The answer is simple: it’s fun. I’ve been working in software for over 15 years now and sometimes it’s been fun and sometimes it hasn’t. But for some reason I always find it fun to work with REALbasic.
Right now I also work a lot with C#, VB.NET and Team Foundation Server. These latest Microsoft technologies are incredibly powerful but are also immense and complex. Perhaps not as complex as Java J2EE, but they’re getting there. I just don’t find them fun. The printed manuals for the .NET 1.1 framework consists of 7 volumes spread over 10 books that stack to over 2.5 feet high! I have no idea how much bigger the .NET 2.0 manuals would be. Really, it’s just not fun. And now there’s WPF, XAML, WF, WCF and more. It looks neat at first, but then I start working with it and I find that it’s just not fun. And you can tell it won’t be fun just by the boring, unfun(tm) names that Microsoft calls these things.
I find Java to be much the same. It looks like it should be fun, and might have been at one point, but it isn’t fun any more. I have an entire shelf of Java books that I have never finished because they were boring. And believe me, boring is not fun.
In the past, I worked quite a bit with PowerBuilder. In its day, I found it fun. But now is no longer its day. I think it became unfun when Sybase thought PowerBuilder should integrate with Java. I don’t think that ever worked out well. Now (see PB 11 beta) they are integrating PowerBuilder with .NET. That’s two unfun things for PowerBuilder. Perhaps practical, but definitely not fun.
I never worked with Visual Basic before .NET, but it seems to me that a lot of people thought that VB6 was fun. And many of these people don’t seem to find .NET fun. To them, I say “try REALbasic!”
I hear a lot of talk about Ruby on Rails, although I don’t know that much about it. I think there is a lot of buzz around it because people find it fun.
I find REALbasic fun because:
- I can work on Mac OS X, my preferred OS, yet create applications for Windows
- the language reference is only about 1,000 pages (not 10,000 or more)
- it’s simple to learn
- the IDE is simple to use
- The language is very robust
- I write for a REALbasic magazine
- the community is great
REALbasic would be even more fun if it could also easily create web applications, but eventually it will. It actually can create web applications now, just not as easily as I would like. And for web apps maybe I should look into RoR, anyway.
So, I use REALbasic because I think it’s fun. And if I’m not having fun then I don’t want to do this anymore.
Do you have fun making software? Or are you stuck working with something unfun?
April 18th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
You’re kidding right? A language you have to BUY?? You may be having fun, but REALBasic is going to stay REALUnpopular…
April 18th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Thanks for reading! I think you missed my point, though, which was to start a discussion about why people use the languages they do.
BTW, REALbasic Standard is free for use on Linux. There are a lot of other free choices out there. Which do you find fun?
April 19th, 2007 at 9:18 am
I gotta tell you, this was the reason that I moved from PHP to ruby/rails, then to Python/WXWidgets.
There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you realize that you just added a huge chunk of functionality to your program with 20 lines of code.
…going to go check out realbasic now.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:15 am
I’ve recently been playing around with various web development frameworks and know just what you mean by “fun”. By day I do web development in ASP.NET and have recently been looking at Windows Workflow. Those technologies are incredibly powerful, but when you just want to get something done they’re just too damn big and complex.
If you haven’t already, take a look at Ruby On Rails or even Django (Python). THAT’S fun!
May 9th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Hey John! Good to hear from you! I’ve heard great things about RoR and I plan to check it out. I’ll have to add Django/Python as well.