I'm a programmer, I build things, and I like to pick tools that gives me lots of power, speed of development and is fun to work with.
For the web I work with CFML using the OpenBD engine, it's fast, reliable and powerful, I use MySQL for database work for the same reasons.
For desktop I picked LiveCode.
If you have no clue what LiveCode is; It's a Crossplatform Rapid Application Development tool.
It's a graphical environment with a built-in IDE, it's the next-gen of what Delphi was and could have been.
The RAD part is seriously true, you can make things really fast with LiveCode.
But the more I work with it the more its quirks are starting to get to me though, and it's mostly small things that should not be issues!
Here's my list of petpeeves in LiveCode:
Over the day as I use it, it slows to an absolute crawl, and I have to restart it a couple of times a day to be able to continue working in it.
No hightlighting in the IDE. Seriously, none, just blocks of text, this brings me to my next point.
No way (That I know of) to use an external editor. I use Notepad++ for my web stuff, I LOVE that editor, it's as flexible as needed, does highlighting and I can make my own patterns if I want to, just being able to use that as my external editor would make my development that much fast.
The compiler can't handle \
Seriously guys, LiveCode is at version 6.x something, and your compiler still clonks out on the \ character?
I have a project that relies almost entirely on regex, which LiveCode "supports". I put support in citationmarks because.. it doesn't. The compiler has random breakdowns if you try to escape characters, which, you know, happens every once in a blue moon (All the time) in regex.
No simple "Stop" button. Loops happen, sometimes I would like to get out of that endless loop in a simple way, without having to hard-close the whole LiveCode editor, or by "inserting a break" (Which sometimes isn't possible because the *whole thing* has locked up due to a loop)
The Dictionary. The dictionary itself is an absolutely great feature, but for some reason that thing is so incredibly resource heavy or malcoded that it randomly locks up, forcing the whole editor to a grinding halt.
No built-in json handling, nope there's no built-in way to handle json. There is an excellent 3rd party library though, but even so, json is arguable pretty common (Industry standard...) and would be nice to have available by default.
The mouse scroll stops working when flipping between the various parts, but starts working if you press the Escape button once.
All of this is mostly minor, but they all add up to frustration.
That's a nice list of bad stuff, are there no good sides to this thing?
Oh yes there are.
The speed, the syntax (It's like broken English, lol), the community (I've only had a couple of bad experiences on their forums, other coders seem very willing to help most of the time)
It's an almost-mature product, I love coding in it and I'll continue to do so, but I can't rely solely on it because of the above issues, I have to use other solutions simply because LiveCode can't handle the simple stuff, like escaping characters.
I currently do not have a commercial license with LiveCode (And I haven't released any commercial software with it) but I plan to get it, simply because LiveCode IS that good, fast and fun to work with, and I think (hope) that these issues will be rectified in the future.
If it was me, I'd focus on fixing issues like these rather than put new functions on there, because I need Regex to work a whole lot more than I need a built-in json library (Especially since LiveCode claims to be fully regex compliant using the PCRE Perl regex engine)
There you have it, a 5-minute rant about LiveCode.
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