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Anthony B. Coates wrote: > ... > > Not so. The most illuminating thing for me was to have spent a couple of years > as a multimedia developer, using Macromedia's Director. A multimedia developer is usually a visual person. They are working on creating a visual product. It isn't surprising to me that a visual environment would be more efficient than a textual one. But I'm talking about something like a computer program or a schema which has no intrinsic preference one way or the other. > ... Director opens up development to a far larger group of people > than most programming languages do, by lowering the level of entry. Director opens up multimedia development. That makes sense for two reasons: * first, as I said before, you're building something visual and probably every pixel counts. Doing that in a text file is no good (which is why I gave up on text-edited XML as a general replacement for PowerPoint) * Second, you're contrasting the visual abstraction layer with Lingo, which is a full programming language and probably at totally the wrong layer of abstraction. I have faith that whatever Lingo's GUI got right as an abstraction could be emulated in a carefully designed XML vocabulary (perhaps something like SMIL???) It isn't fair to compare a carefully designed GUI abstraction to a poorly chosen textual abstraction. > What makes Director different to more typical programming IDEs? Director has > to appeal to both programmers & artists. It would be a failure in its target > market if it didn't. By contrast, many technical specs never rise beyond an > ASCII view of life and the universe. So it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that > they sometimes seem best handled using the plainest text editor available. There is nothing wrong with handling data in a visual environment. I just argued against using that as an excuse for poor language design. Paul Prescod
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