FileMakery, Part I
I have been following Steven Blackwell’s post and comments to it with keen interest. It touches on a pattern of FileMaker polemics I have been mulling over myself. There is a certain tension in the FileMaker community that is often framed in terms of competing philosophies: geek vs. regular-joe, theory versus practice, technical versus non-technical, relational design versus flat design and so on. It is the same tension that has some complaining that FileMaker Pro 8 is still not a sufficiently serious developer tool, and yet others lamenting how FileMaker has become too complex–that it has lost its way because it is now much more difficult to use.
Gladly Would He Teach, and Gladly Learn
I believe there is a fundamental question about how learning is going to have to be acquired in the future for the FileMaker community. This is both a conceptual and an economic question. There are a lot of misimpressions about future learning in the FileMaker community; likewise, there is also a huge amount of self–denial. Some of these unreasonable expectations stem from the cultural background and history of the community: in the early days it was largely a self-help, help-others approach. People learned their way into FileMaker. Those days are long since gone; a systematic approach to learning how to use these products and how they work together is needed.