how long will Basic last
 

I know Basic isnt as good because.......well, it isnt as good. But is the majority of the outright animosity towards it due to the script kiddies?

I used Visual Basic for a long time before I knew it was hated by all respected people (I did not have internet access)

I have no malicious thought or intent, I just like to goof around with programming for myself and family.

I am not going to use Visual Basic with windows any longer.

Do you think Basic such as Gambas and RealBasic for linux will survive, or will they be dead within a few years?


If they die (GAMBAS and RealBasic) how long would it be before apps written with the last versions of them stop working with newer Linux Distros as they are updated and change as time passes? Of course I am not looking for a Date they would stop working, but perhaps your experiance and knowledge could make guestimates? (a couple of years or can't see why they would ever stop working or they are not likely to be ported to <SomethingOrTheOther> that everyone will be using by 2010 or ...)

I dont want to run an older Distro forever just to run such apps.I mean to say if it would not run on a modern, updated system it would not be as useful/fun for me.


I have already read a lot of post about other languages that should not be that hard to learn. At this moment I am interested in the longivity of basic with linux.

Even though you dislike Basic please try to help with this question. If I could I would send you a bullet to bite on :)

Thanks

Let me get my crystal ball... Who knows what the future will bring? Not me at any rate - it's way too hard to call and put a number on how many years a program will run for. Bit-rot affects all software.

As far as I can tell, the best protection from bit-rot is making sure you have the source code available. How popular something is is also important, but I think so long as the basic interpretter is open source, it has a much better chance of surviving than it's closed-source rivals.

I would guess that as long as there is Visual Basic and the Gambas developers remain interested...
On the other hand, there is some recent work on wxbasic/gtkbasic by one of the contributors to Puppy Linux. They actually use it quite a lot for building down-n-dirty GUI's for configuration, etc. It's actually quite handy since it provides a very capable front-end for manipulating windows under X. They use it quite a bit in conjunction with GTKDIALOG which allows you to build GUI's using glade. Then a few lines of basic code stuck in there let's you do nearly anything you want quickly. It beats the pants off using zenity, gdialog, Xdialog or other such tools for constructing quick UI front-ends for scripted commands.

As long as you have the interpreter or compiler (ideally, the source code for the interpreter or compiler, in a language that has a functioning interpreter or compiler), you should be able to run your code. At least in theory. If the code in question relies on OS-specific or other system-specific features, such as graphics subsystem, filesystem types, or specific hardware, then obsolescence will occur along with those dependencies. Of course, a lot of other stuff will be obsolete along with your BASIC code, and such is the way of computing. At some point, most people recognize that progress requires us to forget about the old, bite the bullet, and move forward. I was certain that a lot of the BASIC code I wrote back around 1980 would be important to me in the 90's and beyond, and I took pains to preserve it, and I still have it somewhere, if I ever need it. I'm pretty sure I won't, though. Having said that, I still have a pet project that involves building a BASIC interpreter using Lex & Yacc, so I can add features to the language that would have been useful back when BASIC was all I knew.
--- rod.

Thanks all of you for the replies,

I am mulling this over

The denigration (don't you just love big words?) of BASIC is a holdover from the early days when BASIC was a language that promoted spaghetti code and had limited capabilities. Todays basics are not the same language. I do much of my work these days in PureBasic. To my mind it is more reminiscent of Turbo Pascal than of the early BASICS. It is a structured, compiled language that creates small fast executables and can be cross-compiled between Windows, Linux and MAC (as long as you don't use OS specific API calls). There are those who look down their noses at BASIC, but that is mainly just snobbery; if it does the job for you, why not use it?

that's pretty much all that should be worried about really

True, as long as it is only ever going to be maintained by you, and that said code is not 'mission critical'. If the code must endure a substantial lifetime where it is maintained by others, then there seems, indeed, to be other things that should be worried about. There is the aforementioned consideration of portability to new platforms, as well, but that has already been discussed.
--- rod.

RealBASIC and Business BASIC both have large established userbases. They're not going to up and convert to something else overnight...

Granted, BASIC was the second language I learned (after struggling with the concepts behind Perl at the age of 10), and it probably did me more harm than good. It was a neat little language, but I wish it wasn't taught as an introductory language.

Gambas still has a fighting chance in this world - it's got the BASIC look and feel, with a few well-placed perks thrown in. VisualBASIC is only still around because it's easy to teach, working - usable - code can be cranked out at a decently fast rate, it's easily readable, and - this reason is key - is because it's Microsoft's baby. Despite early versions of Windows, and MS-DOS, being the stable C and assembly (and newer versions being assembly and C++), QBASIC and QuickBASIC were the original widespread languages for developing applications under those operating systems. The early BASICs were tailored around providing a language that gave the coder full access to the system's abilities (even hardware I/O) and it was bloody easy to learn.

I haven't touched BASIC since I noodled around with Gambas a few years ago - since then, it's all been Common Lisp, Java, C# and bits of C, Python and Perl. For a virgin programmer (pardon the term), BASICs of any sort are a warm embrace of welcome into the world of code crunching.

If you mean the original BASIC that first appeared in the '60s, then yes, that variant won't be used anymore. BASIC has adapted to different forms; the most popular being VB.NET.

How long will it last? I'd say it's going to be around for a while. However, Python seems to be gaining a fair amount of traction among open-source developers and unlike VB.NET, Python is cross-platform.

If you have BASIC knowledge, then I wouldn't throw it out completely, but it wouldn't hurt to look at a more cross-platform language either.

Use what works. Peace and goodwill. Languages last forever.

COBOL, FORTRAN, ADA, and Jovial are still used. COBOL is mission-critical for many financial firms. Any language that made it into something like mainstream use will persist. Somewhere.

The reason is the cost of porting a BASIC app to C or whatever is large compared to buying a license for a BASIC compiler.

What's better yet, is when you can find a free compiler. One project that really has my eye is the Parrot dynamic language compiler and virtual machine. Granted, it doesn't compile to native binaries, but with the systems these days, like Sun Blade servers - which I could only assume large enough firms would make use of, or something very similar - would you really notice that much of a difference?

Some of the languages allow optimizations that a typical programmer might not think of anyways. I read an article about that recently, where some C programs were ported to Java, and ended up running faster, despite the runtime compilation, due to other optimizations that the language allowed (specifically in memory management).