Diego's Departure and the future of SV

Bruce,

You want Unicode, you want 64-bit. After your Clarion.net experience, how likely (1-10) are you to contribute crowd funding?

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That’s an interesting question. And the answer is not simple. “It Depends” - mostly on how much money it is, what I get for that money, and whether I believe I’ll get what they say. Likelihood? I’d say 50/50 - Either I will, or I won’t. Frankly there’s probably only a 1 in 10 chance they’ll actually get around to actually initiating some sort of crowd funding - so there’s that as well. They clearly have a credibility problem though so that definitely plays a role.

Would I pay for 64 bit? Yes. Probably a fairly large amount (for some definition of large). It would be enormously valuable to us (what does your software revenue for 1 or 2 years look like? Would it add that much life to our income?) Would I prepay for 64 bit? That’s a much more complicated question.

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Your 64-bit answer seems to indicate that you do indeed have some interest in what SV does.
If 64-bit is valuable to your business and your judgement is that Clarion has a less than XX% chance of getting there in a required time frame, what are the options?

Substitute any highly valued feature for 64-bit and I think the question explains why there is interest in what SV is doing and is planning.

IMHO what’s really annoying about Clarion.NET is that SoftVelocity continued to issue statements saying updates were going to happen and those updates never materialised.

https://clarionsharp.com/blog/category/clarionsharp/

On to Clarion.Net 4.0 – it’s been in use within the IDE since the first release of C10. And we released it to several developers who needed to update their production programs to support .Net 4. We plan on making a general release before the year end, and it’s likely that when we release C11 we’ll update it to .Net 4.5

that was in October 2017.
Same type of statement was made several times on the newsgroups eg
softvelocity.public.clarionsharp 25/03/2015 from Robert Zaunere when asked about the possibility of getting the latest Clarion.NET build (that was visible in a Webinar demo from Diego)

Hi Graham,
Yes there is a new .Net build in testing, we’ll know better on a release date
end of this week.
Robert

OK things change, but be honest about it don’t lead people on.

And don’t forget that SV are still selling it, despite it not having been updated for years and not likely to be! Having the best intentions is one thing, but it’s clear that SV has no regard whatsoever for its customers.

Also consider that what we have received to date is, at best, a beta version. It’s not a finished product. And the website in 2011 made no reference to the product not being finished. Quite the contrary!

I would make the same decision if I was actively using Clarion. To harm your own productivity because of a long standing grudge would be a level of “principle” that I doubt anybody would seek to attain!

I think this is the most likely option. It’ll never even get off the ground, so becomes a moot point.

I have interest in what they do. (I don’t think I said I didn’t?) I’ve lobbied hard for both Unicode and 64 bit. But my point is that worrying about what they will do, or when they’ll do it, is both pointless and unfruitful. They’ll do whatever they want, on whatever schedule they want. In the meantime we’ll do what we do, and focus on making our business better.

There are no options. If Clarion doesn’t do 64 bit the the app will stay 32 bit. It’s not like I’m about to rewrite it in some other language - that would be vastly more expensive than it’s worth. 64 bit is valuable, very valuable, but it’s not an existential issue. Down the road users may not even be using desktop software. And chances are I’ll be retired before Windows drops support for 32 bit.

That said 64 bit would be really nice - I can certainly make use of it. but it’s not like I’m staying up nights worrying about SV’s future and whether 64 bit will ever arrive…

Bruce

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C’mon Bruce, no panic and arm flailing?

Bruce - Thank you for taking the time to post your replies. I am sure that most people (like myself) greatly appreciate your opinion of Clarion and Softvelocity.

I would also like to see a 64 bit Clarion - but I can also live with it being 32bit. I couldn’t imagine moving my applications to another development environment - Clarion allows me to produce very complex database applications very easily. I would have been lost without Clarion.

I hope Softvelocity continues and I would be happy to pay a yearly subscription for small updates and bug fixes, C11 is already an amazing system. Clarion has allowed me to make millions and provide jobs for over 100 families and the products we developed supported thousands more companies - all for the pittance Clarion charged over the years.

Anyone who complains about what they get for their money with Clarion is missing the point - Clarion is a tool that provides you with endless possibilities all for an incredibly low price. Every Time I saw Bruce Barrington I told him Thank You !!! - and I continue to feel that way now that Softvelocity is run by Bob Z. Clarion and Softvelocity made a huge difference in my life.

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I don’t think anyone has complained about “what they get for their money” in terms of Clarion (targeting 32bit Windows). The complaints revolve around Clarion.Net, which was never delivered as a finished product, and certainly did not represent value for money. In fact it didn’t represent any value whatsoever!

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Agree 100% with you

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Umm… I shipped production work that used Clarion#

Now that said, I’m glad that SV decided to walk away from clarion.net and clarion#, IMO it was the wrong approach to supporting .NET. What makes clarion valuable to most clarionites is the code generation system, not the language (said the hand coder).

IMO Clarion.NET should’ve generated C# and/or VB.NET. That means that Clarion.NET would be mainly templates, (and new screen / report designers). They should not have tried to create a new clarion language, certainly not at that time. Maybe now with Roslyn it would be easy enough to create a real full blown Clarion#. In any case the entire RTL would need to be written so that it has no Win32 dependencies - which was not the case with Clarion#

IMO Clarion.NET should’ve generated C# and/or VB.NET

Actually Clarion.NET always has generated C# code - the Clarion# code is translated via an AST to C# and it’s the C# that’s compiled (using CSS) to the DLL and/or EXE
(somewhere on the ClarionMag archive site there’s an article I wrote with Dave Harms showing how you can see this in action and grab the C# code that’s generated by the abstract syntax tree)

In fact at CIDC 2017 Robert Zaunere indicated that an upcoming Clarion.NET 4.0 release would make the C# code available so it could be used in VS projects…

On to Clarion.Net 4.0 – it’s been in use within the IDE since the first release of C10. And we released it to several developers who needed to update their production programs to support .Net 4. We plan on making a general release before the year end, and it’s likely that when we release C11 we’ll update it to .Net 4.5. We are supporting a new feature in the next release, during the compilation of the Clarion code we’ll generate C# code and project file (into a separate folder) that provides the exact same functionality as your Clarion code. That means for those who want to work with WPF or share code with a C# project, you can easily bring the code into VS.

Unfortunately nothing came of this.

.

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Let’s define some terms, to help reduce the confusion.

Clarion# was ( is ? ) the language, which at compile time was converted to C# and then compiled.
Clarion.NET was the entire package, IDE, templates, etc.

in my opinion the major problems with Clarion# were (in no particular order)

  • rare language, so could not use examples found online
  • poor to non-existent documentation
  • incomplete version of C# so there were many things you could do in C# that you could not do with Clarion#
  • for a lot of work the RTL was required, which had Win32 dependencies and 32 bit versions at that, thereby losing several of the advantages of .NET
  • (last I checked) is missing a language service, so could not fully take advantage of the vastly superior VS IDE

Then I feel sorry for your customers. The parts of the Clarion RTL that were actually ported to .Net are full of bugs. Why you’d lump this on unsuspecting customers I can’t imagine. But presumably your “production work” was extremely basic, and you may have gotten lucky.

That’s not true, at least not in the way Mark was using “generate”. Yes, the Clarion# compiler compiled to C#, but that’s different to generating to C#. Mark was suggesting that the Clarion# templates should have generated C#, into which you would embed C# code and so on. Compiling via C# has no benefit in the sense that you cannot read the code, edit it, or embed in it.

That said I’m personally happy the Clarion# project got dropped. It wasn’t going anywhere, probably needed at least 5 more years of intense effort to “complete”. I get that my opinion is not universal - lots of people really wanted a .Net solution, but alas I was not one of them.

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In this context, in relation to “MS compact forms,” what/who does MS refer to?

It was a framework for screens for compact devices for .Net Think phones.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Compact_Framework

Thank you!

Andy Flewelling
Cell - 207-831-4430