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Re: KBasic
by davcefai on Sunday 03/Oct/2004, @04:48
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I have to disagree with the "Basic is bad" generalisation. Bad for whom? Bad for what?
Remember that BASIC started out as an 8K ROM on computers which had from 16 to 64 KB RAM and ran at 1MHz. I suspect that a lot of the initial features were dictated by these limitations. Since then the language has developed out of all recognition. I personally started with Sinclair (Timex in the US) Basic and worked up through IBM Basic, PBasic, CBasic under CP/M, TurboBasic and the Visual Basic from VB3 upwards. With every move (over 25 years) I have been able to port programs I wanted to.
Today, under Windows, I use VB6 and VBA in the MS Office suite. I can use MS Access or VB6 to access MySQL amd MS SQL Server databases with virtually no limitations. "Dave, we need to track the value of XXXX every minute and produce graphs accesible only by Production Managers" generally results in 10 minutes work on the Control System, 20 minutes on the Data Logging app (written in VB6) and another 20 in MS Access to produce the client module.
Unfortunately this type of functionality seems not to exist currently under Linux - AND I DESPERATELY WANT IT TO! There must be a whole horde of people out there with similar needs to mine. An elitist "who needs BASIC anyway" mindset is only going to slow down the takeup of Linux.
Take OpenOffice. They dumped BASIC in favour of a different language. It has made the migration from MS Office to OpenOffice EXTREMELY difficult. Yes you can migrate, but at the expense of dumping all the macros and custom code one had in MS Office. In other words, desirable as OpenOffice (and StarOffice) is, there is a serious hurdle to overcome in migrating. To my mind the problem is not "retraining" users - this is mostly necessary to stop the whining of "It's so different and not powerful enough for my needs" - but the rewriting of all the custom stuff in what appears to be a cumbersome and convoluted language, which is intended to be an "improvement" on BASIC.
My view: forget the linguistics, the purism and the elitist views. BASIC has worked well for years and is familiar to LOTS of people. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. On the other hand having it available will make Linux a lot more attractive to prospective migrants. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Linux to Windows and OpenOffice to MS Office but the lack of BASIC is a major handicap. |
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