I used to love Basic.
Basic was the first language I learned about 25 years ago. Basic is the language I used to create a kick-ass accounting application back in the CP/M days, and it run faster than the COBOL version. Basic is the way I paid for my college money, by teaching kids to program their old Spectrum and TI-94A computers back before the PC took off.
Now, I find Basic not so much…
I admit I am not a Windows guy so I never used VB or .NET. I realize there is Gambas for Linux and Real Basic for Mac. But it doesn’t seem to have the power of other languages. Why?
Maybe Basic did not have the syntax elegance of Python or Ruby, or the intricate library and static typing of C++ or Java (at least in my days, A was a number variable and A$ was a string, period.) But just as Perl, Basic got the job done and done well. I bet that if someone came up with a real funky and easy to use graphic library, more people would take time to learn Basic as opposed to using Qt with C++, wxPython with Python, or Cocoa with Mac OS X (no, I don’t mention SWING Java because I think it is too hard compared to the other options).