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FEATURE

The REALBasic Revolution

Now Anyone Can Program

Issue: 1.1 (August/September 2002)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc wishes he had time to play with Legos.
Article Description: Why REALbasic is important.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,769
Starting Page Number: 16
Article Number: 1003
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

As a child, my favorite toy was my Lego set. I had no brothers or sisters, and growing up overseas, I often had to entertain myself. I'd spend hours with those Legos, building entire towns, creating strange new vehicles, and inventing mechanical devices that worked via a kludgy mixture of rubberbands and pulleys. I never had the fancy sets with battery-operated motors and special parts; I was forced to make do with generic pieces. This spurred my imagination and increased my problem-solving skills. I had disdain for my U.S.-resident cousins who always had the special kits and unique pieces. Where was the challenge in that?

Years later, I discovered computers. Computers in the early- and mid-eighties were a lot like Legos. They could be made to do anything you could imagine, with the only catch being that you had to figure out how to control them.

It was during those heady days of discovery that I realized the true beauty and power of a computer. A computer wasn't a single device like a typewriter or calculator. It was hundreds of devices, thousands, millions. By simply running a different program the computer became a different device. What a fantastic concept!

I fell in love with computers not because they let me rewrite my stories or because of a cool game or some neat graphics I saw, but because of their infinite potential.

Today's computers are more like today's Legos: there are special kits for all sorts of projects. You need something to organize your videotape collection? Bingo, buy a program. You need to retouch photographs? Send Adobe your money. Sure, there's some learning overhead and the program can't always do exactly what you want, but overall, the major work has been done for you.

But where's the challenge in that? What if you need something unique? What if you want to do something no one else has ever done? Perhaps your needs are so specialized there aren't any mass-market solutions for your situation.

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