It was an Atari 800 (not XL – Yes I am older than you). I very quickly got frustrated with Atari BASIC and bought OSS Basic XL which was much more capable… Then I moved to another OSS language; Action! which was a sort of combination of some aspects of BASIC, Pascal and C.

That got me started on programming out of school… and i have done some coding on every job I’ve had since then though it was never in my job description. At work that initially was with Pascal on a VAX

At home I went to the Atari ST 16 bit because i could not afford a Mac Plus … But then there was the Magic Sack which converted the ST to a Mac and eventually went to real Macs.

Coding for the Mac in Pascal was not to bad… but I ever really made the jump to OOP back then.

I have a mental block against C type languages (be they straight C or C++ or other variants)… Not because of concepts or logic, but simply because of syntax… I find it exceedingly hard to read…

So when everything started moving that way I stopped coding for number of years… Until I found REALBasic (RB at version 3).

RB allowed me to get up to speed in OOP and as well as create decent GUI apps quickly… AND be Xplatform. That was important because I was Mac at home and (at that time) I was Mac at work IN TEH OFFICe but in teh laboratory all the equipment was run by PCs.. Being able to do most of my coding and a lot of the testing on a Mac but being able to on PC was vital. I created a number of apps on my job that were used by others day in and day out for years and made my department more efficient.

Now at a new employer (and coding is still not part of my job description) I’ve used REALStudio to create a Web app that helps make my life and that of my internal customers much easier.

If not for RB, I likely would not be coding these days.

Atlanta was good since Atlanta is a major international airport and the hub for delta. Other cities would be good too (I live in ATL so it was real convenient for me). Whatever location we do it at, we need to think of the people traveling from overseas. We had several (3-4) from Australia, and more from Europe.

I want to thank all the speakers for spending all the time and effort to write up the presentations. And the harder part of actually giving them.

Thanks for a great conference!

I was unable to attend, but I paid the registration fee. Could you please make the videos available to me? Thanks.

Thanks again!

I find that having autocomplete for fields with strong typecasting to be important since the IDE helps you before runtime. It also flags the developer when fields are in the table that have no class properties.