I’ll chime in and give my 2 cents. I know I have not been a frequent poster on the forum, but I can tell you that I have been making good use of QB64 since I discovered it about a year and a half ago. QB64 is already amazing and it is becoming better and better! Yes, it would be great if it was at the top of the list of the worlds programming languages, but don’t forget that it is already amazing that it has gotten this far and that it is improving.
The QB45 compatibility and familiarity of the interface were the main things that drew me in and made me stay with it instead of going with one of the alternatives I found. To me, the interface was not a drawback but an asset. Although I had largely been away from programming for years, I could pick it up and run with it almost immediately because of the prior QB45 and VB6 syntax knowledge.
I think that I represent a type of QB64 user (and I think there are many others like me) who either use QB64 or who would be excited to use it if they discovered it: I am the middle aged user who started out with BASIC as a child/teenager and got reasonably good at it, but did not have a need to move to another language because BASIC did everything I needed all the way through graduate school and beyond. My day job is not being a programmer so what a professional programmer needs or uses is of lesser importance to me. What is most important is that I am able to come up with an idea and implement it using a language that I know (instead of having to start from zero by learning a new language first before I can implement the idea). I solve problems, and QB64 has enabled me to relatively quickly write programs that help me solve these problems. The extended functionalities (especially the clipboard functions and image handling functions) have been extremely useful. QB64 enabled me to write programs that daily save me tremendous amounts of time. I really appreciate the developers who are keeping QB64 alive and improving, and I appreciate everyone on the forum who responded the times that I did post questions on the forums. I believe that if I had known about QB64 years ago, I would have been using it already back then. It is also exciting to see it become more and more useful. For example, these new debugging features that are being worked on will be game changers.
Again, I believe there must be many like me who do not know about QB64, but who would use it if they knew. How can those people be reached?
Another type of potential user would be a younger person without prior exposure to/love of BASIC. What can be done to reach such a person?
In any case, QB64 is extremely useful to me. Although I usually don’t have time to participate in the discussions on the forum, I often read them and often learn something from them. Keep up the good work!
L
