Most of what I've learned about Clarion development I have learned from non-Clarion developers

Owned by David Harms
Jul 07, 2015
3 min read

There are a lot of really amazing developers in the Clarion community, and as the editor and publisher of Clarion Magazine I've learned a great deal from them and continue to do so. Most recently Mike Hanson showed me a terrific construct for lengthy source processes which I've used a ton. 

But as good as the Clarion community is (and it's absolutely terrific), in the grand scheme of things it's a small place. By one estimate there are 18.5 million software developers in the world. How many Clarion developers are there? In the CPD heyday Clarion probably had in excess of 20,000 users. I'd say that number is somewhat lower now, as Clarion largely shed its populist, "hobbyist" image (sorry if I've opened any old wounds) with CDD and then Clarion for Windows. 

Let's say there are 10,000 users, for the sake of argument. I really don't know; it's a shot in the dark, and all I can say with reasonably certainty is that it's accurate within an order of magnitude. 

That arbitrary 10k number translates to 0.0541%, or one developer in 1850.

If the Cool Developer Ratio holds, then for every Clarion developer you know doing something really amazing, there are 1850 developers in other languages doing something equally amazing. 

That's a lot of amazingness. 

If you want to mine that brainpower for stuff you can use in Clarion development, where should you begin? 

I love me some podcasts

My favorite way to tap into the latest and greatest technologies and techniques for software development is to listen to podcasts. But which podcasts?

The Windows platform seems like a good starting point. And the biggest arena for Windows development, especially for desktop apps, is the .NET framework. 

Consequently, my number one choice for developer podcasts is .NET Rocks. DNR has been on the air since a few months after the initial .NET release. The first show aired August 30 2002, and the one thousandth show came out a little over a year ago. 

That's a lot of shows. 

You might want to start with the full list of past episodes. Or check out the tag cloud. DNR isn't always on topic, which can be a good thing - have a look at the excellent Geek Out shows.

My second choice is Hanselminutes. Scott Hanselman is a Microsoft employee who casts his net a little wider than DNR. He's pretty heavy on web development and open source. 

Other podcasts of interest, in no particular order:

Why bother?

I've spent the majority of my professional coding life using Clarion. But it's my past experience with Java and C# that more than anything informs how I go about writing Clarion code. 

Most of us who write Clarion code have been spoiled by our tooling. For a few decades now we've had code generation and a database layer and declarative user interfaces and a bunch of other things that gave us a huge advantage over mainstream developers. 

I have good news and I have bad news. 

The bad news is the rest of the development world has not been standing still. They've been improving their tools, techniques, productivity and code quality, and the Clarion advantage is far less than it once was. 

The good news is the rest of the development world has not been standing still. They've been improving their tools, techniques, productivity and code quality, and a lot of that goodness can be applied to Clarion development.

But first you have to learn what's good and why it's good. Podcasts are a great place to start. Every episode won't be a winner, and sometimes you'll have to hear a topic presented a few times before you realize it really is something you can use. And maybe podcasts don't work for you at all because you're an e-book or video or conference learner. Whatever.

The point is we're a teeny tiny community in the world of software development, and there's only so much we're going to come up with on our own. There's a wealth of information out there. Let's use it every way we can. 

What are you favorite non-Clarion learning resources?

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