Author Topic: Programming experience  (Read 640 times)

Artanicus

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Programming experience
« on: July 15, 2016, 03:38:05 pm »
Programming these things is proving to be quite frustrating over all. I'll try to iterate the things that irk me.
a) It's a silly programming language that seems to be somewhere around VB-like, but this isn't really stated anywhere. Just the odd statement of "you don't need to be a programmer" .. I'm a programmer and I'm still lost with this silly language :D
b) There's no documentation of what's available of the programming language features of the base language (e.g. I  tried to concat strings with & which doesn't work, need to use + which can't handle string & int concats)
c) There's no documentation of what's been added in addition to the base language, i.e. what is specific to dealing with the mcModules. Sure there's LedRed and friends in the examples but how do I get the ID of the mcModule for example? I'm sure there's a variable with a very specific name that magically has the data but what it is, who knows.
d) The examples are available only inside mcStudio. And since you can't open another instance of it, to refer to them you're flipping  between projects. Could you publish all the examples on GitHub / Bitbucket so we could file bugs, pull requests etc against them? Let's make the examples great!
e) Being limited to mcStudio to write code. The editor is clunky, period. Sure I can write my code in Vim and copy-paste it over, but howabout some standalone tools to push code to the modules debug / permanent space? Preferably: Open Source, written in C / C++, CLI only, OS agnostic. Stick it on GitHub and unleash the potential.

I see potential but without proper documentation and effortless tools it's not worth investing further effort.

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millennial

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Re: Programming experience
« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2016, 03:44:32 pm »
To answer a-c: Use their support page at http://www.mcthings.com/support/. Specifically, use the mc-ScriptUserGuide at http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5644f11fe4b0d6ca7d80d351/t/577573db1b631bb1e1c169e9/1467315168470/mc-ScriptUserGuide.pdf

I agree with points d and e, especially Git integration and examples on GitHub.

Artanicus

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Re: Programming experience
« Reply #2 on: July 15, 2016, 03:50:59 pm »
Nice, didn't think to look inside a PDF. I'll amend point C, make the language documentation in a searchable and search-engine indexable format, i.e. anything but a PDF. All the code snippets are pictures so searching for function names etc will not yield this PDF as a result. As an example, see: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html

mc-John

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Re: Programming experience
« Reply #3 on: July 15, 2016, 05:21:15 pm »
a-c) I don't know what kind of viewer you have but I use the acrobat viewer and I can search all code snippets and function names.

d) You can open the examples to go to your document and look into the examples. "Documents\mcThings\mcStudio\Examples" I use Notepad++. You can also find the *.lst file there.






kristofferis

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Re: Programming experience
« Reply #4 on: July 16, 2016, 05:26:29 am »
I agree with mc-John, no problem to search inside a PDF.
And I also use Notepad++