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BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

beebase.sourceforge.io

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Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess you also didn’t see a site for a long time where you have to press buttons to do things instead of just scroll down? Not meant to be snarky: I got the same comment on our saas products. Guess people want ’sales sites’ to be one pagers; I don’t exactly know why. Personally I don’t see the difference between scrolling down or pressing buttons but he.

Convenience and familiarity. I'm ashamed to admit, but I too expect to see screenshots and features listed inline on the landing page; it's been a common practice in the last 10 years or so. > Personally I don’t see the difference between scrolling down or pressing buttons Scrolling is untargeted, you just move the wheel or drag your fingers back and forth. Pressing buttons requires you to identify such elements, tar…

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Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#62
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a database for programmers that want to be able to program their database and have a basic GUI on top. If it's too big a hurdle to read the manual you'll never manage to use it for its purpose. Is this a threat to you somehow? In what way? Do you have the same opinion about ripgrep? $ rg 'function(' regex parse error: function( ^ error: unclosed group

The error message from rg says exactly what is the problem though? And that’s what people say BeeBase should do here too. Something like: Error: invalid name: must start with uppercase letter Not some obtuse message that you have to go look up in a manual for no reason

What's an "unclosed group"? And how would I go about finding that out without reading some sort of manual?

Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like this are the reason why I will not touch software like this. I can live with the old school-style and the limited ability set sold on the webpage. But someone bringing up a legit complain and then receiving such hostile behavior, speaks for a toxic community or user hostile developers. And it's not limited to this one comment, but there are several collect here.

They simply said the information is in the manual, there was no hostile behavior. Please stop punching at shadows.

Yeah there’s a lot of people mistaking bluntness for hostility here.

And, at the end of the day, this is a free open source piece of software. The experience could be improved, definitely, but nobody owes it to anyone to do so and it’s important to remember that as well.

Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#65
post #25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's explained on page 8 of the manual, in the tutorial section.

Exactly, it's a bad error message if you need to read 8 pages of tutorial to get that basic feedback.

Its OSS, you are free to change that if you don’t like it.

Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#66
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error message from rg says exactly what is the problem though? And that’s what people say BeeBase should do here too. Something like: Error: invalid name: must start with uppercase letter Not some obtuse message that you have to go look up in a manual for no reason

What's an "unclosed group"? And how would I go about finding that out without reading some sort of manual?

The difference is providing a short succinct message that is either familiar or can be looked up as rg does here, vs vaguely saying invalid name without saying why.

It worsens the UX for no reason.

As a sibling comment said, the program already knows why the name was invalid. It would have cost nothing to surface the reason when reporting the error.

Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#67
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an "unclosed group"? And how would I go about finding that out without reading some sort of manual?

The difference is providing a short succinct message that is either familiar or can be looked up as rg does here, vs vaguely saying invalid name without saying why. It worsens the UX for no reason. As a sibling comment said, the program already knows why the name was invalid. It would have cost nothing to surface the reason when reporting the error.

I'm not arguing that I think "Invalid name" is a good message here. I don't think it is. But if you're relying on either familiarity or the ability to look it up, then you're still relying on there being a manual to provide that information in the first place if it is not somehow included in the error message itself. As would be the case here with Bee and rg.

Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#68
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error message from rg says exactly what is the problem though? And that’s what people say BeeBase should do here too. Something like: Error: invalid name: must start with uppercase letter Not some obtuse message that you have to go look up in a manual for no reason

No, it doesn't. You fill in with knowledge about regex, which isn't explicit in the error message.

The equivalent of BeeBase’s error in your example would be simply “invalid regex”, which I’d say is still more useful as regex is widely understood and there are many tools that you can give regex to that will tell you what is wrong with it.

Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#69

Beyond your computer/workstation, I'd love if there was a personal database program that could also access via your phone, so you can use it on the go (even via dynamic DNS if needed) – modern no-code platforms do that, but data sovereignty would be nice.

Lately I've started using a barebones SQLite DB for this and a GUI DB editor program (TablePlus, which happens to have an iOS app as well).

I'd always relied on ORMs in whatever web application I used to interact with DBs for the most part, but I've recently been learning more about views, triggers, and more complex relations. It's been insightful and I've found that much of what I want from a program like BeeBase is covered by knowing more SQL.

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That being said, I'd love to see what you described too. I don't mean for this to be like the infamous "why do you need dropbox when you have rsync" comment. I just wanted to give an anecdotal alternative to use until someone creates what you described!

Re: BeeBase, a programmable relational database with graphical user interface

#70
From a cursory glance, the Lisp dialect that BeeBase is using is closest to Common Lisp, is that correct? Sorry, I'm not an expert on CL, but it would be great to see a quick comparison of BeeBase Lisp with other popular Lisp dialects, like this: https://clojure.org/reference/lisps
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