Some of the links still don't work. I'm actually working on the forward right now.
I cannot stress enough the incredible value of sites like yours - and I'm not just blowing smoke up your kilt!
Seriously, from my extensive research on the BASIC language industry, one of the key factors was community fan site contributions. For most versions of BASIC out there, they simply don't exist! On average, the best examples had one - ONE fan site! I can easily count four off the top of my head for QB64, and I haven't even started looking because, quite frankly, I don't have to! By that I mean, also unlike many versions of BASIC, the QB64 community has a strong and active forum, an engaged and responsive developer, a well-maintained instructional wiki, actively supported secondary application development projects, an extensive YouTube video tutorial library, and even numerous printed books! (thanks to the legacy compatibility with QBasic and QuickBASIC). So your site is not only a welcome resource, but a vital one in an industry that just doesn't seem to get it.
The best example to illustrate my point is XOJO (formerly RealBASIC). They have a guy who's sole job is to promote the language with video tutorials, forum contributions, and answering emails. They call him a "product evangelist". But outside of his efforts there are only three outside web sites; one is just a blog, another is a library of very old stuff based on RealBASIC that no longer exists but they still charge for their outdated materials(!), and the third is a tutorial site with only one tutorial! And this is for a version of BASIC that costs hundreds of dollars! Never mind the fact that XOJO isn't actually BASIC either. It's more of an OOP Rapid Application Development platform that just happens to include a very badly molested command set that has a passing resemblance to BASIC.
Contrast that with the Python community, which has extensive resources. (In fact, that inspires me to research the comparison between Python and QB64.) I loathe Python. It's not a bad language. It's just a lazy, drop-in, replacement for where BASIC SHOULD be today! I could write volumes about how BASIC went from THE language to "lingua non grata" due almost entirely to Microsoft's incompetence, but that's for another time. The educational community needed something to teach kids programming, and the closest thing to BASIC was Python - just because it was there.
So essentially, thank you! I look forward to watching your progress throughout the coming weeks.
:@)
