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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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