Steve is, of course, right. The clue is in the acronym, "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" (I bet the coding guys were really pleased with themselves when they came up with that acronym). Beginner: why would a professional organisation use a Basic thing when there are "proper" languages available? Perhaps a kind member might care to enlighten this idiot as to what "Python" is. It keeps cropping up, but I've no idea.
I think that we have said before that Galleon (et al) and now Fellippe et al have done wonders (and beyond) starting with QB45. But what (I think) Tempo was talking about was the lack of visibility of QB64, seeing its superb effectiveness of achievement particularly against other similar.
The world population is 7.8 billion, our membership is 524 (0.000007%), and many of these are "one-hit-wonders" who wanted one problem solving and who will never re-appear. We could do better.
mennonite traded BASIC for Python a couple of years ago, and I haven't heard fro him, since. I remember early on he stated he didn't like it nearly as much as QB/QB64, but that he could see it was going to be what replaced BASIC as a popular beginner language. I can't say he was wrong about his assumption.
I think I recall Python being more library oriented. As such, it is a bit easier for beginners to build projects, but at the loss of customization we BASIC programmers enjoy. I think of lot of us BASIC coders love this tinker toy approach to making our projects the way we envision them. I don't think you can say that about the general programming populous. For instance, Notepad looks pretty simple, right? Well, as a library as user could add a text editor to a routine, but to code it from scratch, in BASIC, would take weeks, around 8,000 lines of code.
The two guys that did PowerBASIC had the right idea. They kept a DOS version, all very BASIC in dialect, but then added a Windows version, which was a bit C and Windows API-like. Maybe a similar approach should be entertained, here. Keep a "BASIC" version, but expand to a package that includes usable libraries and API routines that can be easily called by a single statement line of code.
Anyway, just kicking some stuff around, but for a better understanding of what type of catalyst gets a language in front of the masses, perhaps some members would like to research how Python was marketed. I do know schools are a huge inroad, and gaming communities are another, but the trick is to not just get occasionally used or mentioned, but to have some working plan that gains a great amount of acceptance with as little effort as possible. Of course big companies like Microsoft accomplish this with name recognition and carefully crafted slogans like "Windows, a world without walls." Well, as a friend of mine once posted..." If you don't have walls, who the hell needs windows!" Okay, so when you're as big as Microsoft, apparently any stupid slogan will do, but for the people trying to promote a language from a far less well accepted source, it's a higher level of activation that is needed to get the desired reaction from a much wider user base. Maybe Bill and his ADHD protons could help us tunnel our way through this challenge. Okay, now I'm just being goofy.
Pete
