But many here have stated that if Clarion was no longer developed today it wouldn’t affect their business and they could carry on using it, as it stands, for the foreseeable future. So if complete Unicode support is not required by all the current Clarion users, surely there must be potential new users for whom the template system would be revolutionary, and complete Unicode support far less important.
To the powers that be (not mentioning any names because apparently you’re not allowed to even though it’s hard not to when you’re referring to a one-man-show) - stop making excuses and either proudly stand behind your product, or give somebody else a go!
Do I take it that everybody here is embarrassed by Clarion, because it seems that having an open and frank discussion is, clearly, verboten? If the owner of Clarion who shall remain nameless, nor the Clarion community can handle even the smallest of criticism (which was meant in nothing other than a constructive “just get on with it” kind of way), then I have to say that never releasing a Community Edition is absolutely the best way forward (or backward, as the case may be!)
Anyway I’ll be long gone before its ever released, as I’ll be finding out just how criminal the UK really is. Its my birthday surprise to the criminals that run the UK, thats unless I dont end up like Daniel Morgan.
I don’t detect any embarrassment in the Clarion community, only frustration (like yourself) that Clarion is not properly marketed, bugs are ignored, and a basic Clarion app looks like it was designed for Windows 3.1
My learning experience in 2019 wasn’t great, given that the documentation is still referring to Clarion 7. Which is why I rewrote the Getting Started and Learning Clarion stuff for C11.
I’m used to the “it’s not a proper database” propaganda because I use Microsoft Access when I’m not using Clarion. I like both, but for different reasons. And when you add all the NetTalk stuff to C11 it is really powerful.
There are plenty of examples of open and frank discussions about the future of Clarion on this forum. I have found this discussion particularly interesting, since I nearly purchased the .NET version, until I found out on this forum and discovered it was vapourware.
I was also tempted to purchase clarion net, and I refrained due to the comments in the newsgroups. But, what would you get if you actually purchase it today ??
Absolutely! It is frustrating to see something that you know has a huge (literally, huge) untapped market, but the guy who holds the keys seems determined to keep it locked away. And nobody really seems to care!
The community also seems to justify the simple bugs not being fixed by saying “Nobody uses xyz feature anyway, because everybody buys the 3rd party templates from Peter, Paul and Mary”. Maybe if SV advertised that “Some features may not work properly and you’ll have to spend at least 2x the cost of a Clarion license to get something that matches the advertised feature set” I would accept it. But they don’t!
I’ve just had a look at this, and commend you for your efforts. It should be available from SV’s own website and they be paying you for it! The Getting Started and Learning Clarion manuals are indispensable for anyone new to Clarion. I would go as far as to say that this kind of stuff is more valuable to a “Community Edition” than proper Unicode support. Nobody is ever going to try a completely new programming language and programming paradigm without this kind of support material. There’s a reason products like P*Soft’s W**Dev sell by the truckload, and Clarion doesn’t. If they were the only two such products in the world, I can tell you which I would choose (hint, it’s not the one with pretty girls plastered all over the marketing material). Their product is truly an embarrassment of the highest order, but they act like they believe in it, they act like they actually want to sell it, and it sells.
So why was I censored for merely speaking my truth? If some people find it acceptable that SV is still selling a product that is not complete, never will be, and hasn’t been updated in years, then I personally think they are the ones who need to be censored! In any event, I’m glad that you saw something here that dissuaded you from purchasing the .NET version!
I realise it’s a joke, but it would have an element of truth if SV hadn’t completely abandoned it. To be fair, the direction the product was going was completely wrong, so it was always going to be pretty much useless anyway. The only decent thing to do would be to scrap it entirely (i.e. for SV to admit that they’ve scrapped it) and give everybody credit towards Clarion/32 CSP renewals.
If you’re thinking it could be useful to port Clarion code (i.e. existing Clarion apps) to .Net, you’re barking up the wrong tree. The literal translation from one language to another is the easy part. Even the free Clarion2Java someone put together does a thousand times better job at porting an application from Clarion than anything you could ever hope to do with the Clarion.Net package.
