Hello, my name is Hanson, I am a senior developer at RunRev and have been with the company for about one and a half years.
The ease with which you can build with LiveCode is one of the first things that attracted me to RunRev. Outside of work I am busy refurbishing my home, which is undergoing a number of major improvement projects. I complete most of the work myself, so between my full time job and all the building work – well, it keeps you busy! Renovation is a bit like software development. You need the right tools and materials for a particular project, and I have a well stocked and varied selection of tools.
LiveCode is very much like a versatile toolkit for building software. You can see the stack as the foundation and use cards to build each floor, with controls making up the furniture and fixtures. The message path is a bit like the cables and pipes. LiveCode is a pretty complete toolkit that allows you to work on a very wide range of small and larger projects. A software skyscraper is certainly a possibility with LiveCode.
I have had a great time being exposed to a whole range of technologies and disciplines during the time at RunRev, working on large and smaller projects with teams of great developers. Using LiveCode in all of its permutations and flavors has, of course, taken up a large part of the time. Having developed embedded technology and experienced the end of the green screen CRT terminals era, I really enjoyed plain text development when using LiveCode Server to build some of our in-house web technology.
My exposure to Artificial Intelligence in both academia and industry has had a significant impact on the way I develop software and the kind of algorithms I like to implement. LiveCode, with its rich feature-set and language structure provides all of the facets required to implement Artificial Intelligence applications. So far I have used LiveCode to explore Artificial Intelligence in the areas of heuristic search in single player and two games, genetic algorithms for survival optimization of autonomous agents in a hostile environment and image exploitation. Very high up on my list of future Artificial Intelligence concepts to explore are Neural Networks. In particular, I will be looking into Kohonen Networks and Hopfield Networks in a LiveCode context.
