[Capt Shane]

Is it worth the expense???
i want to get a new program for writting programs in os x any suggestions?

[Angus_D]

Definitely not worth the expense. It might be easy to learn and use, but it teaches bad programming habits, it's buggy, slow and bloated, and the company that makes it are generally regarded as asses.

[dogzilla]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
<STRONG>Definitely not worth the expense. It might be easy to learn and use, but it teaches bad programming habits, it's buggy, slow and bloated, and the company that makes it are generally regarded as asses.</STRONG>

No, no - don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.

Wow. I'm asking the following not as a challenge but to get info (I also thought of RealBASIC as an easy way to get into programming the Mac and bought the O'Reilly book and was about to buy 4.0). How does it teach bad programming habits / what are those habits? How is it slow? (I mean, is it relatively or absolutely slow? Slow enough that you notice or just your computer does?)

I've seen some pretty cool things written in RealBASIC (AutoIllustrator, ICamMaster, Ricochet3D, iScreenSaver). Plus, I love the fact that it can create app for OSX, OS9, and even Windows.

[Mactoid]

The only real problems that I've had with RealBASIC are the really huge binaries that it creates. The minimum "Hello world!" type application size is at least 1MB.

It is also much slower then code in straight c, but unless your doing really CPU intensive stuff it shouldn't be a problem.

It is a much nicer language then VB (For what it's worth). At least its all object oriented, so I never really though of it as teach really bad coding practices. I'm curious what in particular angus_d sees wrong in that regard.

Also, the developers are very active on the mailing list (at least they were 1.5 years back when i read it). For people who don't want to learn to program as much as they want to make some quick apps, I'd say it's a perfectly good solution.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Mactoid:
<STRONG>It is also much slower then code in straight c, but unless your doing really CPU intensive stuff it shouldn't be a problem.</STRONG>

Uhm... No, you notice it with just about everything. For example, there's a nice HL client called Panorama, which is completely unusable on OS X because it's so fscking slow.

<STRONG>It is a much nicer language then VB (For what it's worth). At least its all object oriented, so I never really though of it as teach really bad coding practices. I'm curious what in particular angus_d sees wrong in that regard.</STRONG>

It doesn't teach you to separate your object from your model, and it's just too easy to write sloppy code.

<STRONG>Also, the developers are very active on the mailing list (at least they were 1.5 years back when i read it). For people who don't want to learn to program as much as they want to make some quick apps, I'd say it's a perfectly good solution.</STRONG>

It's OK for small apps and as an introduction to OO concepts (I know a few C programmers that learned RB to think in objects before they could really grok C++), but it doesn't *SCALE*. If you try to write anything particularly big, you will find yourself working around bugs in the IDE.

[Drizzt]

It's good for RAD.. and I'm still trying to understand how to work with a database (it's useless to me unless I get that working).

I've done a class in M$ VB, so it's not all lost. It's easier to learn than Cocoa/C/C++/Java, but the possibilities are smaller too.

I say have fun with it, it's a start!

[Mactoid]

Thanks for responding angus_d. I can't disagree with your objections now that you've clarified them. I never actually use other peoples RealBasic code, just small stuff I've done, and it was never to slow. Of course, it occurs to me now that the exception is my graph theory program. The one relatively complex program I made

[l008com]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
<STRONG>Uhm... No, you notice it with just about everything. For example, there's a nice HL client called Panorama, which is completely unusable on OS X because it's so fücking slow.
</STRONG>

Really, cause there's another nice hotline client called Pitbul Pro. It works great, its stable, fast, and so much better than the real thing. It proves that if you know what you're doing, big, complicated programs are very possible. This programs ONLY fault is that it uses ALOT of CPU. But if you are like 90% of the people on earth, most of your CPU goes unused anyway.

You can make really good apps with RB. RB apps that get "OutOfBounds Exception" errors all the time aren't because of RB, its because of poor programming. It is easy to make a crappy app run, for a little while, but it will take some time to make a good app. Most apps are crappy and quick, written by people that are new to programming, and hence RB gets a really bad name.
Another problem is its price. If I was going to make some "real" software, the price would be great, but I'd rather use a more powerful language if I was going to try and make some money off of it. On the other hand, if i was like most people, and I just wanted to make a few programs that were, essentially tools for my self, the price tag is ridiculous, just plain DUMB.
Its also really hard to pirate so I heard!

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by l008com:
<STRONG>Really, cause there's another nice hotline client called Pitbul Pro. It works great, its stable, fast, and so much better than the real thing. It proves that if you know what you're doing, big, complicated programs are very possible. This programs ONLY fault is that it uses ALOT of CPU. But if you are like 90% of the people on earth, most of your CPU goes unused anyway.</STRONG>

Pitbull Pro is hardly a complicated piece of software... I wouldn't even call it a complex hotline client, it doesn't do a lot of the things that Pano does (try it and see). Anyway, I know the person who has developed perhaps the largest RB app, called LCEdit+ (see http://www.cds.nl). There have been many issues in the IDE, and he's had to write plugins to hack around things, and so on. In fact, he even had to write his own Serial class for Mac OS X because REALsoftware was being too slow (it was hardly difficult, he did it in a few hours without any previous knowledge of IOKit, but then again he did have to use his own plugin (Nubz Weird Tools Plugin, it's called) to enable him to use the callbacks -- there is no RB internal way of doing that at this time).

<STRONG>You can make really good apps with RB. RB apps that get "OutOfBounds Exception" errors all the time aren't because of RB, its because of poor programming. It is easy to make a crappy app run, for a little while, but it will take some time to make a good app. Most apps are crappy and quick, written by people that are new to programming, and hence RB gets a really bad name.</STRONG>

You know, that's what I thought about a year and a half ago. I thought RB was the coolest thing ever, I mean, it let me write stuff. I paid for version 2, being told that OS X support would be around in 2.5 and it would probably be a free upgrade (the person who originally developed RB, Andrew Barry, had a policy that bug fix releases would always be free, but he left RB to the idiots like Lorin Rivers who continually make you pay for new releases -- the release cycle is so fast now, it's a joke). As it turned out, they released it as RB 3, and wanted me to shell out all over again. And then they quickly got 3.5 out of the door, with the main new features being "RBScript" (sounds lame, never used it) and MS Office Integration (WTF?), along with "3D support", which is actually an old plugin written by one of the RB engineers that he previously sold, and I don't think it works on Mac OS X. And now we're at 4. The releases just keep rolling by, practically forcing you to upgrade because of bug fixes. Is this really the sort of company that you want to give your money to?

Seriously, the code generation is completely lame. The guy who wrote LCEdit+ did some profiling work on an app, and found that it was something like 3 pages of assembly to join two strings, so he had to write a plugin that replaced RB's own built-in way of doing it and did it his own way. Also, all the "properties" of controls and stuff are stored IN THE DATA FORK OF THE APP IN PLAIN TEXT. I still find that amusing.