Good read, lots of action.
Moral of the story I took away: Yet another person (er kid) trivializing the art of software development.
Moral of the story I took away: Yet another person (er kid) trivializing the art of software development.
jestershinra said:... how many of you would honestly think about doing a project for pay for a 13 year old?
jestershinra said:Had his posts and business plan been more together, he might have gotten a better response...
you'd all be suprised what a bored teenager can do in a summer vacation. i can probably program the basics by august. and of course begin more explanations of why i can't do it.. listen people. I will have to learn this lesson solo people..jestershinra said:It's very hard to be young and want to do things. People automatically assume that you're immature and incapable of working hard. When I was 13, I took the initiative and got a job doing computer repair. I worked hard at work, and hard at home expanding my knowledge. While I wasn't the most knowledgeable guy at the office, I was certainly not the least. Now, 2+ years later, I'm making a good bit more in an office than I was when I started working, and I make good money doing freelance/independent computer repair/training, etc. When you're 15, $35-50 (depending on the customer) is pretty good money, seeing as I don't have a ton of overhead, aside from geek stuff. I get a nice tax refund too, because I don't work enough for it to be qualified as full time, year round.
The point of this story is that I feel for the OP, and I completely understand why he didn't originally post his age. Setting aside his business plan for a moment, how many of you would honestly think about doing a project for pay for a 13 year old? Had his posts and business plan been more together, he might have gotten a better response.
To the OP- in theory, and application like that would be a godsend for the masses; it would help people with little or no coding knowledge be extremely productive. In practice, though, it doesn't seem feasible. The sheer coding knowledge to do something like that would be rare. As other have said, you'd need to program for an extremely large number of actions. This has been tried by, and I mean no disrespect by this, people and companies with more resources and coding talent than you have at your disposal, and hasn't really caught on in the general population. Automator is looking to change that, but whether that will work remains to be seen.
I'll wrap this up now. virus1, don't get too discouraged. You had a good idea, but it just isn't feasible. Continue your learning and continue to further your knowledge, though. You never know what opportunities may present themselves if you are knowledgeable.
virus1 said:you'd all be suprised what a bored teenager can do in a summer vacation. i can probably program the basics by august. and of course begin more explanations of why i can't do it.. listen people. I will have to learn this lesson solo people..
Best of luck. Really.virus1 said:you'd all be suprised what a bored teenager can do in a summer vacation. i can probably program the basics by august. and of course begin more explanations of why i can't do it.. listen people. I will have to learn this lesson solo people..
feakbeak said:Yes, I talked to virus1 about this quite a bit. He's got a general concept to make programming easy with GUI and everything. However, since he's not a programmer he doesn't understand all the complexities involved.
You either need to go the route of Automator and have everything trimmed down and pre-programmed otherwise you are essentially just creating yet another IDE for programmers. In doing something like Automator it is almost required that you limit the functionality of the actions, you don't offer end-users to tweak all of the details that might be related to a particular action. If you did you would need to create a UI that had a tremendous amount of options. If you did this all with preprogrammed functions it would be daunting to provide a library vast enough to give you the tools you would really need to develop a fully-developed application. If you tried to make a generic GUI and have the system libraries programmaticly translated... well that would be one hell of a technical feat that would require some damn good programming. I'm from the Windows side of programming and there are TypeLibs and stuff available to describe your COM objects and such but converting that into a sensible GUI for the end user is an insane task, IMO.
Anything in between Automator and generic IDE and you end up with something like Visual Basic, which is fine but there are several technologies available like this already and you still need to know a lot more about programming than the average consumer which is the market virus1 is targeting.
superbovine said:yeah, i did a research project, that i wrote my own language and grammar to create a 3D tree, that could be used to random generate a forrest. the parser was written in C++ using the opengl libraries. so yes, you can 'invent' a language using another language. you can also make libraries and extention for objective-c. my point is a programming language is open ended because it lets you have limitless possibilities on what you can create.
Thom_Edwards said:now that the mystery of what the application has been unshrouded, i think i'll chime in. i remember once thinking of a similar program, but nothing even close to the scope of what is being presented here. my idea (when i was about 15, if i remember correctly) was to construct a flowchart that would then become the actual code automatically. it would have drag-n-drop flowchart symbols, each having appropriate attributes, that could be connected to form the logic and flow.
when i thought of it, it sounded great. me and my buddy talked about it at great length. that was, however, before either of us knew what it really meant to program. sure, it *might* have been possible for the programs we were writing at the time (which were simple BASIC apps, nothing even closely resembling a modern application written with an oop language), but *anything* past that would be impossible. i think that once you learn to program, you will realize the magnitude of the project.
so, good thinking, virus. it's good to have ideas and have creative thoughts, even when they don't always work out. but it's definitely a no-go. just as others have said, it just wouldn't work, especially for a hobbyist to complete in a few months. also, if it were such a marketable and doable application, i feel someone would have done it by now. the idea has been around for at least 20 years that i'm aware of.
my friends are all really hyped up on two programs called game maker and fusion. they allow them to create games really easily. they were able to create a 2d fps in about 30 min.. and they are not programmers or anything..Omen88 said:And something slightly more off-topic.
Does anyone remember Game Builder or World Builder. It allowed you to create your own adventure games without programming. It was also something from the late 80's on the mac in black and white.
God the fun I had with that...
My friends were never that impressed with my creations though.
virus1 said:my friends are all really hyped up on two programs called game maker and fusion. they allow them to create games really easily. they were able to create a 2d fps in about 30 min.. and they are not programmers or anything..
virus1 said:my friends are all really hyped up on two programs called game maker and fusion. they allow them to create games really easily. they were able to create a 2d fps in about 30 min.. and they are not programmers or anything..
listen guys.. i told you i am going to have to learn this by myself. parsing as i understand it is pretty complicated. i will not attempt to incorperate parsing in the first summer of work. guys if you remember, pm me at the end of the summer to see how it went. its not oop i have problems with, it is the more advanced concepts of cocoa. and i will tell you again, my app will be able to do everything xcode can, because it has cocoa built right into it.mj_1903 said:Those applications are very rigid with regards to what you can create. Set rules, set objects, set motions and set game dynamics. You definitely can't create anything original with them except maybe with regards to graphics.
As for the idea, programming is too open-ended to create an application that can create 95% of other applications. That's why a programming environment like Cocoa is made up of thousands of little blocks that can be morphed into a big comprehensive block. Automator on the other hand is dozens of big blocks that can be roughly assembled into a chain but not into something useful to all. It might cover 50% of cases but that leaves the other 50% for true programs.
Oh, by the way, I started out programming at 14 (currently 20) and after spending 6 months developing Connoissuer (along with 2 employees) I can assure you that your project is not something that can be done by one person in a summer let alone one person who has still not grasped the fundamentals of Cocoa/OOP.
As an example, this function took 2 weeks of solid programming and bug testing to get to a 95% standard. It does basic language parsing to read in recipes in different formats pretty similar to what you will be doing with code except recipes all have a relatively standard format.
Omen88 said:Does anyone remember Game Builder or World Builder. It allowed you to create your own adventure games without programming. It was also something from the late 80's on the mac in black and white.
God the fun I had with that...
My friends were never that impressed with my creations though.
don't forgot knows nothing about the software developement cycle.
FearFactor47 said:I live in Scotland and have done Higher Computing. is this ADITDEM (Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Documentation, Evaluation and Maintenance?)
virus1 said:and i will tell you again, my app will be able to do everything xcode can, because it has cocoa built right into it.
i mean into the scripting environment..mj_1903 said:Just like Preview can do everything Xcode can because it has Cocoa built in, right? What does having Cocoa built in mean anyway? :-/
*muffled laughter*virus1 said:im sure you will buy it long before then. before i go to bed though, i would like to say a bunch of things:
-Sorry to all about being a bit cocky.
-it was all in good fun, i just got a little carried away
-I am going to reject the person who volunteered to write this app
-I am going to stop hiding behind the fact that i am 13 years old
-Instead, i will learn objective c myself and write the app myself
-i have reconsidered and will likely take more like a year to make
i didn't tell people that im 13 y.o. because people usually don't take me seriously, and i suppose i understand that.
thank you feakbeak for all your support
if anyone is willing to donate thier time to the app, the idea is an application that will allow people without coding experience to develop full featured applications harnessing the power of objective c and cocoa. The advantages:
-a coder only needs to do the basics, then i can finish it off with the basics
-if the application itself fails, i can easily develop applications in my spare time with it, and that is how the developer would be repaid
what makes this possible is it's ingenious ui.
there is a big hole in the market there, because a lot of people want to create their own applications for thier own intrests, but don't have enough knowledge to do so. our competitors are realbasic, where they still need to learn code, same with supercard, any form of basic even. and thats it.
now make with the apologies people!! jk jk
big post.. time for sleep