In my opinion, the main problem with MultiCharts is the fact there is only a small community. Just a few users (still the same) that share their strategies/codes/experience or that participate to the features/bugs.
Yes, the community is not very big. However, I don't share your view that there is a lot less sharing (when correcting the amount of sharing for the smaller MC community when comparing with the NT community). (See also comment later on)
But the fact is, MC users get their indicators/strategies from the TS community, not the opposite. A lot of traders like having new strategies/techniques to adapt to the market etc... I see only old code/strategies on the forum, nothing really new since 2/3 years (except the bug reports and the feature requests but that's normal).
I'm a MC user and don't get indicators/strategies from the TS community and I suspect I'm not the only one, ergo your "fact" about all MC users is more a opinion than a fact.
I inclined to disagree with that there is "nothing really new" for the last three years shared on the forum. I've seen some threads with new things and added myself some thing thats I view as new. Also, if you're interesting in a more active community, I don't know how helpful it will be to downplay the efforts of the people who have contributed in the last three years. Which I don't mean as a flame or negative comment, but as a way of saying that for an active community we need both a) people willing to help/share with others
and b) people who appreciate their time and effort.
With MC.net, I think it's an opportunity to open the software to a new community with different kind of users (geek/developers/pros...). NT users are sharing a lot their experiences/strategies/indicator/code/techniques... NT users are MUCH MORE active than TS/MC users! Just check large forums, you will find about 400 complex strategies for NT (not only a few old (commercial) indicators on lovely charts).
If the product (the interface/API with .NET) is easy to use, developers from other softwares will use it and contribute and then the community will grow.
I'm not sure why there would be more sharing with MC .NET. One might even argue that, since the MC .NET target audience are more experienced/professional programmers, there might be even
less sharing, since these people have less to gain from sharing.
I don't know if NT users are "much more active" than MC users. At this moment, there are 35,912 NT users who have made 655 threads in the "NinjaScript File Sharing Discussion" subforum. That's roughly the equivalent of 1,83 sharing thread per 100 users. There are 1,838 MC forum users, who made 296 threads in the "User Contributed Studies and Indicator Library" subforum, which would be the equivalent of 16,10 sharing threads per 100 MC users.
I do agree however that the sharing on this forum can be improved, but I don't think it's programming language (PowerLanguage) related, but more a question of forum software. For example, the "User Contributed Studies and Indicator Library" subforum is hard to get a good overview from. Some threads in that subforum are discussions or help requests, and the default forum search function is not very good (in my view) in finding threads.
A better download section where users can contribute their indicators/functions/signals
and know that these will be seen by other MC users might foster more a community. The download section of BMT is a good example of this, where every indicator has a description, screenshot, download attachment and a thanks/feedback form. That's a clean and efficient way to see what is shared and to get your own shared work "out there".
Also, a "Want your indicator/strategy/function created free"-thread might be a good idea. However, I'm not going to start that topic since then I feel I should answer/help all people who comment in that.
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(Which is not to say I would not be willing to participate in such a thread).
One thing that I like about MultiCharts is that it's possible to review the code for the existing indicators/functions/signals to learn more about how they work, and to modify them to create custom indicators/functions/signals. At the same time, one of my "pet peeves" is that all of these code samples seem to use generic variable names.
Agreed. The EasyLanguage coding examples could use better variables names but I think also more comments about what the code does and
why certain calculation assumptions were made. I'm also sometimes horrified by the coding standards that are used in the "out-of-the-box" EasyLanguage indicators/functions.
It's all a compromise really, except for two aspects; stability and reliability. Given trading futures is a very risky business, those two aspects are paramount. There's no point having a product jam packed with great features when it's order processing is unreliable or the software is unstable.
Totally agree.
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