Many many years ago when REALbasic first wrote the IDE in REALbasic it was said
“We’re also ‘eating our own dog food,’” said Perlman. Previous releases of REALbasic were coded using the C++ language, although with REALbasic 5.5, the last significant update, the groundwork was laid to add pieces that were written in REALbasic. When REALbasic 2005 is released, the entire Integrated Development Environment (IDE) will have been recoded in REALbasic itself.
“That has some benefits for our customers, most of them indirect” said Perlman. The engineers who are developing REALbasic are now having an experience more in line with their customers’ own experience, which gives them a better sense of what does and doesn’t work.
https://www.macworld.com/article/174461/realbasic-45.html
The various API changes made over the past 2+ years should be treated the same. They fundamentally change users experience. When Xojo’s team isn’t using the same API’s day in day out that users are the disconnect is as if they are writing in a completely different language.
Amen to that. I spent a month or more converting my (rather large) app from API 1 to API 2. While a lot of API 2 makes sense (e.g. 0- vs 1-based methods), other stuff was baffling.
I still haven’t managed to convert from Date to DateTime, mainly because my app is critically dependent on Date (and its attendant quirks), and there’s no direct path to DateTime other than MAJOR rewrites.
I remember RB 5.5 fondly as one of the most stable and best performing versions of the IDE…
IMO much of API 2 makes the language just different and/or more verbose much of it with little to no benefit… but lots of downside for old code.
And readability is a funny thing … too short names make code hard to read… but IMO in a different way so do names that are too long despite being more descriptive… It makes it harder to quickly scan and digest code…. The wall of text syndrome.
I thought API 1 struck a good balance … API 2 much less so.
API 2 certainly has changed how I feel about Xojo.
-Karen
While the advent of VISTA caused me to abandon Windows in favor of macOS…. so did API2 (and the change in company attitude) cause me to abandon Xojo. I had been an advocate of RealBasic/Studio/Xojo since 2006….. but I cannot in good conscience support or reccomend this product any longer.
So since XPlat isn’t important to me… I am in process of deveoping my own version of a developement system based on Swift. And guess what, I’m at the point now, where I am “eating my own dogfood”