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| Are English Developers 2nd Class Developers? |
| Iniciado por guest, 09,ene. 2016 00:38 - 17 respuestas |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 00:38 |
Hi,
I've almost made the purchase and keep reading these very discouraging posts... about the way PC Soft is treating the English language developers as 2nd class citizens and giving their French speaking developers an edge and advantage by not creating English versions of their videos, the LST, and other help and articles.
Also, why do French developers get a 6 month head start advantage over us English developers? That could be the reason why its English adoption rate is low around the world given the English language is for more popular than French…
Right now with the French developers using V21, there is no English content available for V21, and very little for V20 and V19 that I can find, while the French LST and video publications is pushing volumes out to their developers. I feel they are giving us just enough to get us hooked and then leave us to try and figure it out for ourselves…
Am I missing something here? Is this getting better? And if I buy into their ecosystem, am I on my own with only myself, Glenn and Fabrice to figure it all out? I can clearly see the value the LST would bring to us, but PC Soft's unwillingness to do an English version is causing cold feet... Is my reaction justified?
Thanks,
Stanley |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 01:23 |
Hello Stanley
There is definitely a marked and extremely annoying disparity in technical support for non French users in terms of the LST and videos. This does not extend to Tech Support as they have very good English language skills and in my experience always give as much help as possible within the framework they operate in
The delay in release dates between the language versions can be viewed as a lack of true support and in the past that was my view, but I now view it as a positive feature for the English language version as it means that the French developers are debugging each version for us and that is a big plus for the non French developers.
As long as this forum is running you will never be on your own 
Regards
Al |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 01:42 |
Hi Al,
Your words are encouraging...
We still need those videos and an English LST to get the most from the product thereby saving us YEARS of discovering it on our own.
An English version of the LST would certainly drive more English sales and adoption rate. This very concern has been why I haven't purchased yet, and if these issues were already addressed by PCSoft, then this conversation would not exist.
The main purpose of this thread is to gauge whether PC Soft is making improvements in this "so needed" venue and narrowing that preferential gap?
Thanks,
Stanley |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 01:53 |
| I've been using Windev for almost 10 years and it doesn't seem that they're motivated to change the way they do things. It is too bad, it's a great product and I'd love to see more adoption in the US. Seems like a lost opportunity to me. |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 08:07 |
Hi,
in regards to release dates being 4 -5 months behind, I'm with Al. It's definitely an advantage. Each year I have the next French version on my computer. Naturally, the early releases are date driven, their staff has to make it ready around the beginning of December, this time they delayed until the 15th of Dec. I wouldn't recommend to immediately switch from the previous French version to the newest one - except for very good reasons. Regard yourself lucky to use the already debugged English versions ..
In regards to English videos and LSTs. I believe, it's a matter of French-English man-power resources in Montpellier and as long as sales is just fine the lack of those things really doesn't make a big difference. For English-language videos, there's brother Bill, I don't know whether he's doing that on his own or with support from PCS. With a little knowledge of French, which is recommended for using PC Soft products anyway, you can buy and interpret the LSTs. The French programs (commands) of the LSTs can be translated to English with a click in the IDE and Google or something slightly better can (not will) assist you in understanding what's meant. For the text just put the pages into a scanner, use something like Abbey Fine Reader on the text image and translate using a xlation tool. Be warned however, "computer French" is not 1:1 compatible with "computer English"
For us, WINDEV is a great tool to save lots of man-months. Time to market is in the worst case half of the time needed using ANY other tool. Which means that a program which took you 12 months using VB.Net or C# or .. whatever will need only 6 months to finish. With some really great AAF (automatic application features) added for free. WINDEV programs are stable to an unbelievable extent! If you can get it to work fine on your dev computer, it will work under all circumstances. If you're a one-man show and you earned yourself 4000 US$ per month, in the long run WINDEV will earn you 8000 and that's quite a difference.
Of course, there are some shortcomings, you will need to learn / use a separate installer (like Inno Setup), this is unavoidable. Using SCM takes some courage, otherwise there are some workarounds. Go and find a good Help authoring tool, do not use the provided one. |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 09:15 |
Hi Guenter ,
OK, I agree that if their released versions are buggy, I too want to stay away until its stable.
>> as long as sales is just fine the lack of those things really doesn't make a big difference
Doesn't make a big difference to who? Someone that created the product (PCSoft) or someone new to the software like me and thousands of others? For me, it would make a huge difference in my understanding.
And now you are suggesting and PCSoft is requiring that I do my own translations in an attempt to understand and use their product. Its this kind of thinking that is causing the division of 1st and 2nd class developers.
So, now I have to add French to my skill set in order to be productive. I would rather spend my time learning the tool set, or JavaScript instead of French. Learning French for the sole purpose of using this company's software is such a waste of time.
If I have to learn French first as suggested, the WinDev productivity you talk about would be non-existent, correct? How long would it take to learn French to be able to understand their materials?
you will need to learn / use a separate installer (like Inno Setup), this is unavoidable.
So, the builtin installer creation tools are broken too???
>> Using SCM takes some courage, otherwise there are some workarounds.
What sort of workarounds? What are the problems? I hear a lot of praise for SCM and you are saying the opposite.
Guenter, I do appreciate your thoughts and expressed passion about the WX suites.
Thanks,
Stanley |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 12:52 |
| About this subject I have decided to learn french. And fast. Now I can understand 50% of what I listen and 70% of what I read. I think that receiving a stable and debugged tool is very good. And with some workarounds we can get things done. |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 14:33 |
In my opinion PCSoft can do much better on serving the English market. How much will it cost to translate LST? Or to sub title their videos? It doesn't even require their own resources. It can simply be outsourced.
A few years ago their marketing manager did a little survey on how many users would take a subscription on LST when available in English language. See previous topic
My response to him was not to make the decision on the number of users but on how serious PCSoft is on entering the English market.
So far nothing changed 
Cheers,
Adri |
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| Publicado el 09,enero 2016 - 15:07 |
I took up a challenge to debug a buggy project of 100wdw+ and 50+ tables in windev 5.5 with every lines of code inc. comments in French lang. plus I knew nothing about windev at all at that time but I made it successfully working in English windev. Then, I started moving away from ocx, vc++,vb and even .net for building apps to wx till now.
Still, my French lang. skill is no more than 1%. I just treat myself like a chef to
cook French food for french customers. And even did one project with windev
in Hungarian lang. and even worse I have 0.00% knowing Hungarian lang.
Yes. It's a good product to build apps 10+ faster esp. building wm apps for IOS,
a way faster than using XCode/Swift...
Cheers
King |
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| Publicado el 10,enero 2016 - 23:58 |
Hi Stanley,
I have been using WX for 20+ years... I have seen a lot of people coming from other tools, lots of them succeeding with windev and others not.
So my experience tells me that if at this point, with all the questions you asked, with all the testing you have been doing in the express version, and with all the information we gave you, you are STILL not convinced, then you should NOT buy Windev, it's clearly not for you...
Best regards |
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| Publicado el 11,enero 2016 - 21:23 |
I completely agree with fabrice.
Generally speaking, people who are mainly interested in functions / features not working in a dev tool, will later never be happy with that tool
regards, Heinz |
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| Publicado el 12,enero 2016 - 02:38 |
My 2 cents worth.
The SCM works well for me. In fact - I think it's brilliant and for me - works better than TFS. |
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| Publicado el 12,enero 2016 - 04:33 |
Hi Luiz,
>> Now I can understand 50% of what I listen and 70% of what I read.
How long did it take you to achieve this? Is your native language similar to French?
Thanks,
Stanley |
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| Publicado el 17,enero 2016 - 15:37 |
All development tools have positive and negative aspects. For me, Windev is better than the alternatives. Is it perfect, no. Does it do everything I want, no. Has it always done everything I need, yes.
My guess is that would be true of every product on the market. A lot of it depends on where you come from, what style of coding works best for you, and what kind of software you want to develop.
If you come from a FoxPro background, you might want to look at Lianja (www.lianja.com). It is made by the same people that made the Recital database development suite (basically Foxpro for Linux).
From their website, "Lianja App Builder is a flexible cross-platform development tool that supports multiple programming languages. To build applications in Lianja App Builder, developers can use their existing programming language expertise in Visual FoxPro, JavaScript, PHP and Python".
My background was in Basic and Pascal and Clarion, and I found the W language easy to learn and really enjoy the Software Engineer friendly IDE that WinDev provides. However, people who come with other skill sets might well find a tool like Lianja more to their liking.
I learned a long time ago not to put all my eggs in one basket. WinDev is my favorite tool, not my only tool. I really enjoyed using Clarion at one point, but the need to constantly buy other products and templates to do what I needed to do on almost every project finally was too much. For 90% of what I do, WinDev works well and requires no additional purchases. For the other 10%, I am always evaluating other products. |
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| Publicado el 18,enero 2016 - 20:02 |
Thanks Donald, I appreciate your perspective. I have downloaded and installed Lianja and installed it. Not done anything with it yet either.
And, I've already cut the check for all WX products, and hopefully with Glenn by my side I can explore and learn how to become productive with this new toolset...
Thanks,
Stanley |
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| Publicado el 19,enero 2016 - 07:12 |
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| Publicado el 19,enero 2016 - 10:17 |
stanlyn
I have taken a look at lianja in the past as well. It is verry visual. In my opinion WX is more a programmers tool . Lianja can be used by no coders as well.
I think wx is more powerfull and easier to use
Do not get me wrong it might be your product since you come form visiual fox pro. You can use that scripting language and that would be a big plus for you. ( smaller lurning curve) It is a bit pricy in my opinion. One could have all wx products for this price . And with wx you can make native apps
For me the source code mananger works fine. The insaller is just a windev project witch you can completely customize. Out of the box it works just fine. It even profides out of the box an auto update feature. This works great. !!!!
PC Soft targetting the English market.
Indeed they seem to make enough money in France. I got a french mail from them, for I pruchased a french licence Cool advertizing, lots of video's on pcsoft.fr.
They are missing out on a huge marked for sure. In Holland government agensies with huge bugets are trying out apps like mendix. Witch is a cool product but webdev can compete with that in speed for sure!! But the product isnot even considderd , they do not know it exists!!
regards
Allard |
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| Publicado el 19,enero 2016 - 20:36 |
Hi Stanlyn,
Sorry for the delay.
My native language is Portuguese (Brasil). Already have a good background of Spanish and English. Had some basic sttudies of French (about 1 year) and German (2 years) in the youth. |
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