> Even Visual Basic, a real platform that evolved over many years and gained “serious language features”, has fallen out of fashion
VB didn't fall out of fashion. Microsoft unceremoniously killed it and replaced it with VB.NET - a language nobody asked for. VB.NET has the verbosity of C# but with none of the benefits.
These days there's little incentive to learn VB because it's been dead for quarter of a century. And there's little point reviving it because anyone who wants a GUI will likely be working with web frameworks.
I did like VB, a lot. It was such a shame to see the abomination MS released with VB.NET. And that makes me all the more grateful that most languages these days are open. For example Perl 6 (now Raku) ended up taking a journey that fragmented the ecosystem, so dedicated and passionate Perl developers took on the mantel to continue the life of Perl 5
Wrote a basic interpreter in C/Wasm last year. Finished it, but in the end never posted it anywhere. While I started my dev journey with Basic as a child, I was quickly reminded why I moved to C as soon as I learned about it. Basic is just not particular useful and has a lot of funny behavior or missing parts for any serious project. I still enjoy C, sometimes ASM, but not basic anymore.
> Basic is just not particular useful and has a lot of funny behavior or missing parts for any serious project.
I think it is an interesting teaching tool. It has a lot of limitations that place it close to the machine level - all variables being global, no real named functions, and so on. It grounds the expectations about what a computer can and can't do - all the fancy things we do are smoke and mirrors layered on top of a very simple machine.
It is true, I did learn Basic (QBasic) first, as elementary school student, and C second. What made it particular good was the F1 help. I think it is still one of the best help systems I ever used. Good intro and F1 while pointing on any function and instant help, easy to understand. Additionally no complicated include and compiling. But at the same time, I think I could also teach simple C or JS to an elementary school student. It is just the help and runtime that is bad. Somehow still today there is no major language system that does all of this well. Curious...
super interesting! wonder how hard it would be to make this a target for haxe, which has already solved a lot of the issues around designing a good cross-target language.
VB didn't fall out of fashion. Microsoft unceremoniously killed it and replaced it with VB.NET - a language nobody asked for. VB.NET has the verbosity of C# but with none of the benefits.
These days there's little incentive to learn VB because it's been dead for quarter of a century. And there's little point reviving it because anyone who wants a GUI will likely be working with web frameworks.
I did like VB, a lot. It was such a shame to see the abomination MS released with VB.NET. And that makes me all the more grateful that most languages these days are open. For example Perl 6 (now Raku) ended up taking a journey that fragmented the ecosystem, so dedicated and passionate Perl developers took on the mantel to continue the life of Perl 5
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