How do I feel about RB?

I'm really confused about how I feel about REALbasic.

I like the engineers. Aaron, Mars, Mike and William are my friends. This is in much the same way that the soap stars are my cousin's friends.

I like the build engineer, Nathan. And who could fail to like Marco.

But I don't like the company much. Its public utterances, though mostly truthful, are often misleading and the company is far too secretive for my liking. I do not mean the utterances by my friends (see above) are misleading.

I like what REALbasic wants to be. I quite like a lot of what it is. But it is the most buggy development environment with which I work by a long way.

It has far too many features which have been included to add to the feature list and have never worked properly or have been left in an unreasonably basic state. Far too many bugs are fixed (or half fixed) and then come back later without anyone seeming to notice.
If your testing doesn't pick up recurrences of old bugs, what can you hope it will pick up?

Now because criticism of the product implies criticism of my friends, I become very defensive when the number one whiner starts again.

But then people tell him he should cut RS some slack because my friends are the only engineers. And then I get really irritable because the company refused to tell me how many engineers there are, even when I offered to sign a non-disclosure agreement and so my best customer won't let me write any of his stuff in RB.

So I join in with the whining. Then I feel guilty because I'm criticising the product that should be so wonderful because it has the right aspirations and is pretty good just as it is now.

So for now I just keep swapping sides and therefore disagreeing with nearly every post I see about the quality, usefulness and future of REALbasic

But for all that, most of the programming I do for myself or for fun I do in REALbasic and will continue to do so.

Another new feature

So, rb2008 will introduce introspection.

Geoff claims it's for the customers' benefit and there will be much screaming from the gallery that RS should be spending their time fixing bugs instead of adding features.

Of course they're concentrating mostly on bug-fixes but some people believe the new features are marketing-led.

What I ask myself is this. Are they spending time adding the features they feel they need to enable them to fix the bugs?

They've been eating their own dogfood for a while now and may be realising there's stuff it ain't so easy to do in RB and they need a few more features to do some of the things they need to do next.

Remember, writing a toolset exposes you to the unpredictable foibles of other developers, just about as badly as anything I can think of.

If you were building a toolset, might you not find you'd give your eye teeth for features like:

• Introspection
  
• Delegates
  
• Control scope
  
• destination directory and command line arguments for debug applications
  
• plugin debuggin'
  
• turning off implicit instantiation
  
• namespaces

Is it just me, or are their stomachs just revolting against the lack of meat in the dogfood?

Getting even grumpier as I age

Sometimes I just want to scream, "Don't you know it's a programming language? Write some code!"

It's usually on the forums but today's example happened to be in the NUG

I think it's incredible that the HTMLViewer
does not have two extremely basic functions: Back() and Forward() -
how can we be without those?

I suppose I should have done my usual helpful point to the history class at my website, (written in 2005r1, I think) but it's the assumptions behind the question that get to me.