sj zero said it better too:

from freebasic.net (totally just found this thread today...)


Maybe you're all right and I've just been overreacting.

It seems to me though, that this language has been moving towards getting rid of the things that make it easy to use to benefit features that make it more complicated to use.

When the compiler started, v1c was making just as many changes as today -- probably more. The thing is, even when we had to go out and change all our code for whatever reason, it made sense why.

For example, when he got rid of using symbols on implicit variables to represent data type, it was plainly obvious that the reason was it was ambiguous because you could have so many versions of the same variable floating around.

When he added pointers, there was obviously no problem, because nothing changed except instead of using VARSEG and VARPTR, you could use actual pointer notation.

I kept 'riding the wave' and was happy to do so for a long time, but lately, the nature of the reasons seem to be changing. Lately, it's been more of "It's changing because you shouldn't be using that command. You're a bad programmer", or even worse "We could design a logical way to make this work, but we don't feel like it because it would be a lot of work, so we're changing these old commands and removing these ones. "

That's the sort of talk that leads to the thousands of dialects of BASIC out there that nobody uses because they arbitrarily change things on a whim. When this all got started, I thought FreeBASIC was supposed to be different -- I thought it was going to be more pragmatic, with more carefully designed changes so it could be useful to people who used to code in old BASICs with only a little bit of effort on their part, but at the same time, useful to the people who want to play around with multi-threading or objects, or one of a lot of different, newer features that weren't included in the original design.

So now we're doing things like taking out keywords from the language that were already functioning because their implementation was a little hackish, and taking out implicit declaration because it's not convenient to design around it, and doing this and that and the other thing, and turning the language, slowly but surely, into one of the languages out there that isn't quite BASIC anymore, not because it's got new features, not because it's got changes, but because those changes are made, like in a C complier, because it's easy or elegant to design and code, not necessarily because it's easy to elegant to use.

But hey, I'm just another Mennonite, whining that FB isn't QB, right? What have I ever done in FB, or for FB? I'm just another idiot who wants to have his little cult, right?

I mean, look at all the people I've gathered who agree with me, to turn this into a big political battle!


<end re-post...> for the record, i'm happy to move beyond qb. if i wanted to move beyond basic, i'd use freepascal or ada, which like c and c++ and java, are both good languages (better than even c++ and java, i think...)

but i don't want to move past BASIC is the thing. i want basic to keep evolving, but not evolve into "c" or anything like it. and not into freebasic, for all the reasons sj zero and i said. (i'd also like to see html evolve, but not into css... or flash...) now this is what BASIC fans might say... wait until freebasic tries to move in on c and c++, and see Their objections to why freebasic isn't better.

most fb users aren't quite that foolish, but some, including v1c, really do have this bent... he even called us the qb "community" (quote marks his own) recently, and was referring to the older qb days... i'm trying to preserve the context here, but i can only guess he thinks we never had one?

pete thinks we should be rename ourselves the "qbasic on linux" forum next year, which i think is fitting, and would help- maybe he was kidding. freebasic is more than anything, a windows language. they will maintain the linux and dos versions to some extent, but while touting it as cross platform, they will use features that don't exist anywhere but windows, and ultimately the "language" will be based on That, resulting in yet another founding-idea of freebasic gone, like compatibility.

the original selling point was compatibility of course, and it's been deprecated and relegated to a -lang switch that i'm pretty sure will never come to real fruition and support (or use.) if it mattered, it would be a core feature. what matters to fb can be seen in the defaults: windows support. support of a language and methods that never stay the same from version to version, dragging everyone along into a new way of doing things every few months, TONS of code that can never be used again (UNLESS it's OO, and probably even then,) and basically being anything but BASIC.

beginners all-purpose symbolic instruction coding. take out beginners and all-purpose, and it's Just-SIC.