Happy new year to everyone!
In my opinion, Basic programming has "died" a long, long time ago... And what killed it was the QBASIC (and, before it, Turbo Basic). In origin, BASIC was pretty different language: it looked similar to Fortran , with line numbers, and heavy use of GOTO. Ugly? Messy? Perhaps; but it was also really easy to figure for a newbie: I was a kid when I first tried the BASIC on a Commodore, it was pretty easy to figure it, since there was just one branching instruction, and just one command to control the flow. It took me a while to figure the purpose of "FOR-NEXT", but I didn't need it, since the same could be achieved with an IF and a GOTO. With structured BASIC things turned less immediate: a look could be defined in three or four different ways (with GOTO, with WHILE-WEND, with DO-LOOP and so on).
The old school BASIC, relying on line numbers and GOTO, was also much easier to help figuring how language machine actually worked. Of course, modifying an old code is a nightmare, so, it was unsuitable for bigger projects, and different languages were made, like Pascal, and then C.
New dialects of BASIC recognized the limits of BASIC, and tried to overcome them... by just copying some features of Pascal. Old books stated how Pascal was superior to Basic.... and when I had the Commodore, I thought Pascal was a magic language for professionals. When I used a PC, and learned QBASIC, I later tried Pascal, and was disappointed, because it seemed not to have anything more than QBASIC.
Further evolution of Basic went on the same path: Visual Basic, for example, copied the OOP featured of C++
With this approach, BASIC survived, but uniformed itself to other languages: it has no unique characteristics, so there is no reason to pick it over another language. I think most of us chose FreeBasic because we learned on QBASIC, and we started on QBASIC just because it was provided with the OS... but someone who has never been exposed to QBASIC before would have no reason to pick BASIC as their first language.
And FreeBasic did nothing to change things, because it was aimed at people who already knew BASIC. When I found FreeBasic, what I wished for was a compiler that produced Windows executables and allowed to use modern libraries: I didn't care about an interpreter or an IDE, since I could always use the old QB for that, and then compile for Windows. FreeBasic was exactly what I wanted, but that was because of my background. And I assume most other users of it were in a similar situation.
All said, I don't think BASIC will die... because I don't want to think that. COBOL is older than BASIC, and there are still programs written in it, and programmers who know COBOL are still in demand. So, as long as there is some code written in a language, the language itself won't be abandoned. But nowadays, if I should recommend a language to introduce someone to programming, Basic wouldn't be the first choice. Perhaps Lua?
coderJeff wrote: ↑Jan 02, 2025 3:14
I am working on a couple of freebasic things, but nothing I want to show yet. I continue to enjoy freebasic though I have not shared lately. It's nice to prototype and can do some heavy lifting at times for certain things. It's also a good starting point to go exploring and have an coding adventure.
A freebasic release is on my mind but first I need some closure and walk my way out of this unicode rabbit hole I went down this last week. I don't make too many promises as that just gives me stress, but yeah, sometime near future.
Is one of those features the new string management (fixed strings without null terminator)?
