First off, what language did you learn at school/uni?
Are you programming in that language now? If not why not?

I learnt mostly Pascal, and C, C++ etc. I’m not doing them at the moment because out of Uni I got hired to write in Clarion (a language I’d never heard of). Surprisingly my new boss didn’t think they should change the whole company just to suit my language of choice.

Plus, the things that will excite the average uni student are not in Clarion. Clarion is not sexy like Linux, or Ruby, or the latest “hype” language like say C#. It’s primary focus is on doing boring, mundane apps, in a highly productive way. This is important only once you are programming for money, and you have bills to pay and children to feed. If I was in Uni now, and I saw Clarion it wouldn’t impress me. The whole reason I went to Uni was to write code, and show others how good my code was. Using a code-generator would have been seriously uncool.

In the Dos days, when Clarion was very popular, it succeeded because it attracted a crowd of people more interested in economics than programming. Getting paid trumped the sexiness of writing code.

Cheers
Bruce

Thanks again for the response.

This time, I have to disagree outright.

All your points are true within a certain realm.

But .. I can guarantee that with the right motivation and installation of belief, anything can be shown to be awesome. It really doesn’t matter (especially in today’s world, with so many fake nerds joining into the development communities, of which i’m one) about whether there’s a code-generator or a sexy ruby interface or an old-school tool like .. i dunno, cobol. What matters is how you make people get excited.

Of course, what i’m talking about is a “realm” to. There will always be people who see through the hype. There are the hordes who travel at a whim. But there’s also a good sized group of people who follow the hype, and then learn about discernment along the way.

And in the end, all three groups would be using Clarion if there was enough hype. Because Clarion is substance. And together, i truly believe those two elements, hype and substance, would mean many people would use Clarion.

Sure, if you saw Clarion on a computer at uni you wouldn’t be impressed. But what if you saw it delivered in a demonstration by a guy who was pragmatic and charismatic, giving you absolutes, showing you just how awesome Clarion is. What it can achieve. Relative to modern day trends, like for us, web 2.0, the buzz words, and then cutting through them to the truth. That Clarion will make you money (yes, he’d say that .. ha ha), puts apps together fast, and has the greatest third-party teams of all development systems.

I’m not foolish here. There are always going to be a nice array of good tools. Like you say, Clarion doesn’t do everything well.

But the point of the university video interview post was that you would establish “word on the street”, start noise, rumbling .. you’d have to back it up with a website or two, other media, constant pressure, all these other things like competitions and seminars and conferences etc.

Of course, there would always come some point at which there was a big roadblock. A big huge stone wall, or brick. Whether that is the people making Clarion, or the pillars of the community, or something worse .. you’d have to make sure you’d thought about it. Planned for it at least.

My ideas these days have a deeper global scope. I’m not thinking of them in isolation anymore.

Again, thankyou for your thoughts. They are, as always, thought-provoking. And that’s just fantastic.

Cheers