QB64 vs Python and a humble request

[Pete]

As an entrance into coding, I was thinking Code Gate (like a Star Gate).

Sorry, already taken. Since a star gate is essentially a portal to a wormhole, how about...

Code Hole

or...

Code Worm

Ha! Actually code worm is taken too, but for some inexplicable reason, Code Hole isn't! Hurry, jump on it before the FreeBASIC people snap it up! :D

This is why Napster just went with a goofy name, even back then, instead of trying to knit known words together or use well known terms or phrases. I mean you can't even get straight to the point ones like Code It or Prog It, and the "It" part would get confused with I.T., anyway, which is never good branding, in the first place.

Okay, who's good around here at making stuff up? Where's Clippy when we need him?

Pete

[bplus]

Yeah I looked up "Code Gate" for usage and I don't think the name really interferes with Security Service Industry, in fact they may coexist well or maybe even be sponsors?

[Pete]

Yeah, but we don't know that. When you deal with schools, they want assurances they won't be pulled into trademark or copyright lawsuits, or for disputes, for that matter. Without a prominent person to get an "in" in the educational system (what an oxymoron that is) you have to present them with a system that has some credentials, like a trademark.

This is the typical go big or go home scenario. QB64 is not proprietary and neither are educational systems that teach how to code. Just think of it this. What we have to date wouldn't even make an interesting spot on a show like Shark Tank. Don't get me wrong. It's a great hobby language, and what I did with for my purposes was phenomenal compared to what so called professionals had available, at that time, but I say I'm one in a million when it comes to having a completely different profession but becoming every bit as good as professional business system programmers just to use for my own purposes. So sure, I appreciated BASIC for a lot more reasons than most people would give it credit for, but that's the rub. This thread is focused on the other half, the masses, who want to know, what great thing can I make with this now, instead of what can I learn to eventually make by learning to use this thing, now.

Pete

[CBTJD]

Well folks, I want to thank you all for your input on this. The committee made their decision this afternoon and sadly, they decided to go with XOJO.

They were very kind and professional about it and we even had a VERY long conference call where they bounced a bunch of questions off of us and offered LOTS of feedback. In the end, I was confident they had at least done their homework and knew the challenges they faced. They scrapped the Mac compatibility aspect, which allowed them to quadruple down on the budget for Raspberry Pi - an idea, frankly, I wish I had thought of.  They'll be able to reach far more students and have a heck of lot more equipment on hand. Once they learned that the RasPi 4 is powerful enough to function as a minimal desktop computer with video and web capabilities, they were sold.

Their decision to go with XOJO was also really well thought out. The yearly XOJO license for the RasPi is free. While it doesn't yet run native on the RasPi, it does run on Windows and Mac and they decided to use the existing library PCs running Windows. Again, not a bad decision really. My biggest complaint with XOJO is that it is NOT BASIC. But again, their mandate was that the chosen language not be Python, not necessarily BASIC. So again, they chose well. XOJO is really quite a well designed language and has a long history as being RealBASIC once upon a time. It's just not the kind of BASIC you get with QB64. Also, ironically, RealBASIC was originally written for the Mac!

The good news for me though is that they accepted my bid for the technical writing aspect. So, whoo hoo, I have a job! None of this affects my attitude toward QB64 though. I still firmly believe it the BEST version of BASIC in the wild. I do hope however, that it will continue to evolve and grow.

For what it's worth, this is the feedback they gave me regarding QB64. Please note, this feedback was already printed up BEFORE our long discussion which lead to the decision to drop the Mac compatibility. During which, I basically eliminated the need for the second item and essentially relegated the entire first item to one of style rather than function. But, as I mentioned, they had pretty much already decided on XOJO:

QB [sic] appears to offer a great deal of flexibility and has a long and impressive lineage. However, certain key feature are missing that are vital to the success of this program.
1) A professional and modern GUI code editor with the following features: - auto code completion - integrated help - proper Mac Command Keys - proper cursor placement - proper mouse control for scrolling
 - a reliable and integrated GUI form designer

2) Commands for dropping files onto icons and windows in Mac.

Apparently, the setup I built for them for testing crashed one too many times. We had the clipboard issue that was dropping Segmentation Faults and I fixed that, and then the InForm designer did the same thing. That didn't help.

Regardless, I now have to re-learn XOJO enough to be able to intelligently write about it. It's okay. And it will serve their needs well. I was just hoping so much to be able to give real BASIC a chance.

Again, thanks for all your help! Please forgive me if you don't hear much from me for awhile. I bid high and they only slightly paused before accepting my offer, so I'm all about that paycheck right now! Looking forward to v1.5!

:@)

[EricE]

they decided to go with XOJO

XOJO?. XOJO is too expensive, and you have to pay a yearly license fee to get upgrades.
Essentially buying the product again each year.

(OK, as mentioned, The yearly XOJO license for the RasPi is free.)

If they wanted to pay for a compiler why didn't they choose PureBasic? It seems just as capable as XOJO is.
Also PureBasic is much less expensive, and offers free upgrades for life.

(PureBasic supports Windows, Linux, and OS X, but I don't know if it supports Raspberry Pi)

BTW, one of the XOJO developers is William Yu who created the popular RapidQ compiler.

I hope the decision to use XOJO works out well for everyone.

[Aurel]

It's not a bad language. It's just a lazy, drop-in, replacement for where BASIC SHOULD be today!

CBTJD... that is a real -> TRUE THAT THING...
and is constantly promoted as good replacement for BASIC ,what is a notorious LIE !
everybody with a "grain of salt in a brain" know that python is completely useless without external libraries written in C. 

and i continue to wandering who is that and what kind of interest(agenda) have to push python everywhere? 

[Pete]

...everybody with a "grain of salt in a brain..."

Ah, that's my problem. I'm on a low sodium brain diet. HELP Mark, what the hell is your buddy talking about now?

Pete

I know, I only speak one language, and those who know me swear it's not English.

[bplus]

Ah, that's my problem. I'm on a low sodium brain diet. HELP Mark, what the hell is your buddy talking about now?

Pete

I know, I only speak one language, and those who know me swear it's not English.

Aurel does not like Python so much.

[Aurel]

Of course that i don't like it , and Pete don't worry you are a good guy .
I just post question about python on one facebook group...and doyou know what one guy tell me :
Raspberry people ...whaaat ?
For XOJO..i really don't know ,from the past i know that RealBasic was very solid product.

[_vince]

I just post question about python on one facebook group...and doyou know what one guy tell me :
Raspberry people ...whaaat ?

What about this, what does this mean?

[Pete]

Thanks mark. Yeah, mennonite asked me once to look into learning Python, but I wasn't that impressed. I just use C/C++ once in a blue moon, but I still really don't know enough to use strings and pointers correctly. For some weird reason, I still my intended results though. I really don't think any other language, at least at my age, is worth me delving into, other than maybe learning a little more JavaScript, and that's just for my website stuff.

I'll return the "good guy" shout out to Aurel. I never could quite understand the rift between him and mennonite though, but I guess you tow had your back and forth moments, too. I the end, its all turned into machine language, anyway. God help us if that's all we had to code in. To me, BASIC is one of the few languages left that bridges the piece by piece approach of machine code or assembly, and turns it into a form of communications more like a spoken language. Kids today will not be getting the benefits to get a feel for how to make a computer do what they want it to do, but they will be able to go further, faster, by learning how to make a computer use some library someone else developed for these OOP like languages.

Pete

[CBTJD]

Kids today will not be getting the benefits to get a feel for how to make a computer do what they want it to do, but they will be able to go further, faster, by learning how to make a computer use some library someone else developed for these OOP like languages.

Exactly! Kids are being taught to include libraries, call those libraries written by somebody else, and then believe they're programmers. I think that goes along with all that nonsense that nobody is a loser and we shouldn't keep score at children's sporting events - that everyone should get an award. That's not to say that libraries don't have their uses. It's just that education isn't one of them. You're not teaching them anything about actually programming! BASIC does. If you ask a kid how those libraries work, they have no clue. But you show a kid that everything is a file and that by altering files in BASIC, you do what those libraries do, THEN you're teaching!

[Pete]

There are losers. They're called, Progressives. Their ideas are so bad, they don't want to keep score, because they'd all realize they're losers.

I'm actually fine with new ways of doing things, but of course that new way is going to get compared to the old way, and it should only replace an older way of doing something if it proves to be distinctly better. Anything else requires a heaping dose of propaganda to survive. Welcome to the U.S.S.A.

I totally agree learning is being replaced by skill sets. It's like pilots today. They use skill sets to manipulate auto pilots, but we saw what happened to that Boeing 737 Malaysian Airline. Gee, if only the damn pilots actually knew how to fly the plane! Oh well, there are no losers, because dead people can't keep score.

I have no problem with kids being shown skill sets, but do so in conjunction with understanding how to make a library. Schools should also should be focused on skill sets, the skill sets of learning. When I want to program a word processor in BASIC, I have to think about forming so many conditions if my brain wasn't used to that type of demand and concentration, I'd never get beyond using INPUT. BASIC actually makes a programmer think and not just follow a skill set. Thinking leads to imagination and that leads to new discoveries, something that just using skill sets alone seems less likely to achieve.

Pete 

[CBTJD]

Wow Pete, I thought I was a crotchety old fart!  :@)

I do like your point about skill sets. You really drive it home with the Malaysian pilots story. It's starting to sound like Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".

It was suggested to me recently that what BASIC needs is a "killer app". But what would that look like? Would it be strictly a Raspberry Pi thing? Robotics? Artificial Intelligence? IoT home control?

The VisiCalc spreadsheet app was the first such "killer app".

Others included EasyWriter, Lotus 1-2-3, he Unix operating system for the PDP-11, Myst for Mac gaming, Halo for Xbox gaming, Deluxe Paint and Video Toaster for the Amiga...

But all of these are applications, BASIC is something used to CREATE applications. So how does that work?

What if BASIC could do something no other programming language could? But what could that be? Being easier to learn doesn't cut it. It's not faster.

Or is it possible that BASIC is just well and truly dead in the 21st century? Has it gone the way of the rotary dial phone, the hand cranked car engine, lawn darts, record players, and 8 track tape players?

{:@\

[Aurel]

Exactly! Kids are being taught to include libraries, call those libraries written by somebody else, and then believe they're programmers

Yes Exactly is that..that is not programming
in py
ohh i need math

import "math"

ohh i need graphic

import "graphic"

etc..etc...

pete..me and mennonite ...gee HE is a figOsDev,
he even publish figOS..on sourceforge ,,,,he he