About S.L. Robinson & Associates, Inc.

If you are here, you probably have an interest in the programming language Natural. We publish the newsletter, Inside Natural . This is the ONLY newsletter on Natural published anywhere. Now in its second decade of publication, Inside Natural endeavors to explain Natural for the benefit of Application Programmers (although sometimes we venture onto DBA turf).

I sometimes confuse "I" and "We" when writing about S. L. Robinson & Associates, Inc. There is a simple reason for this; over the twenty plus years we have been in business, the company has varied in size from one to three employees. We are presently at my most comfortable size, one. I went out on my own over twenty years ago to avoid being forced into management, something I had discovered I was not very good at and really didn't like (One of my first tasks was to fire a friend for incompetence. True, he was incompetent; but he was a friend. I demurred, and my boss had to fire him). There is one advantage to being a one person company, I can still talk about expanding (like around holidays when I eat too much) and downsizing (after the holidays when I go on a diet).

There is an advantage for my clients as well. When they contract for Natural Education , they know who will teach the seminar, me. I have been teaching Natural since it was introduced in 1978. I have taught over three hundred Natural classes to an extensive list of clients worldwide. What does such extensive experience mean to you? It means that every seminar is customized dynamically; the material adapted to the audience; that the students come away from the class with the knowledge they need to program your applications; that your applications are programmed to be both efficient and maintainable.

Over the years of teaching Natural, I developed an extensive set of programs to accompany my presentations. Several years ago, I began "talking my way" through the program libraries as if I were conducting a class. The result is a new software product called Simply Natural . This has been designed to serve a variety of roles. First, it serves as an online replacement for Natural's own help facility. Your programmers do not have to learn a new set of commands or become familiar with a new set of menus, they merely follow through the menu system they are presently using, only to arrive at Simply Natural rather than Natural's own help facility. Second, it serves as an offline educational tool, especially now that the Web Browser front end has been released. Finally, it serves as a source of good code to be "pasted" into programs

One of the things an educator has to avoid is "losing contact with the real world". About once every year or so I become involved with a programming project. The opportunity to be involved with Natural Programming is essential to understanding what facilities in Natural are not being used, or not being used properly. Since I have a fairly busy schedule of seminars, and also produce an issue of Inside Natural every three months, most of the programming projects I have become involved with are within "commuter distance". However, since I have been working with PC Natural for several years now, and since it is so easy to upload and download Natural objects using SYSOBJH (or SpoD) even this restriction has been lifted. When a programming project does not present itself, I often create one for myself. The subscription system for Inside Natural, for example, was origionally written using 4thDimension for the Mac. I then re-wrote the system to use Adabas and Natural running under NT. Then I updated the system to Natural 5 running under Windows 2000, and finally to Natural 6 running under Windows XP, thus affording me an opportunity to employ the many new features that were added to Natural for these releases.

For more information, contact us as shown below

Or, click here to Send us an e-mail