Whiners vs conference attendees: And the winner is...

Published 2008-06-04    Printer-friendly version

It's been interesting to watch the discussions that have developed in the wake of the Aussie DevCon. It seems to be the case that anytime there's a beta release of C7/Clarion# or an announcement of some new feature there's a fresh round of cynicism about the time it's taking to get a gold release of either product (although most of the really violent sentiment seems to center on C7). The Aussie DevCon has been no exception: although AppGen was shown to attendees, there was no release nor was a firm date given for that release (although there was some hint that third party vendors would soon get AppGen for compatibility testing - time will tell).

To be fair to the complainers, some of that cynicism is justified. It really has taken a lot longer than anyone wanted or expected to get even the current AppGen-less beta. But the attitude of the critics who weren't at the Aussie DevCon is in stark contrast to that of the attendees, at least the ones I've heard from who came away with fresh interest in Clarion and hope for the future.

I think there are several reasons for this disparity. One is that SoftVelocity doesn't communicate that much with its customer base, and darkness fosters despair. The folks in Eden got a little more light last weekend than the rest of us have had for some time.

It's also possible that the attendees felt better about Clarion simply because they'd paid to come to a conference and they couldn't afford not to have a good feeling about things. This is along the lines of the idea that you enjoy a wine more if you know it's expensive. I'm not sure that's strictly true, however. I vividly remember the despair that set in at the 1999 Florida DevCon when it appeared that Clarion would be gutted in TopSpeed's rush to DotCom riches.

A slight variation on this theme is the idea that those going to the conference predisposed to feeling good about whatever SoftVelocity is doing.

Maybe.

Or maybe there really is some good news here. On the C7 front SV did, after all, actually demonstrate an AppGen (if somewhat carefully). And that's the last major piece of the C7 puzzle. The new AppGen is capable of converting C6 applications. Testing continues. Some apps convert correct, others require further bug fixes. It's all important progress.

As I said most (thought not all) of the whining and complaining is about C7, not Clarion#. I've even seen a post suggesting that it could take a year for third party support to line up behind a C7 gold release. All I can say to that is if your business plan depeneds on vendors who take that long to respond to major release of Clarion then you have way bigger problems than the C7 delay.

I strongly suspect that the upbeat attitude coming out of the Aussie DevConhas at least as much to do with the Clarion# sessions as it does with the C7 AppGen. It's a long, long time since Clarion programmers had much to be excited about in the way of new language features. The first Clarion for Windows release comes to mind: that opened up a whole new world. Certainly object-oriented support and the ABC class libraries were big changes as well, but in terms of how OOP and ABC impacted the kinds of applications Clarion developers can create I don't think they compare with the transformation of Clarion into Clarion#.

When Clarion 4 introduced OOP and ABC, Bruce Barrington said "Look, it isn't your daddy's Clarion anymore." To paraphrase BB, it isn't your grand-daddy's Clarion anymore. Yes, C7 is the vital next step, but C7 isn't the future. Clarion# is the future.

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