Cringely writes about REALbasic and sees it as a real alternative to .NET for those on a low Microsoft diet.
Mentioning BASIC brings some nostalgic memories to my mind. I started my programming career 20 years (20 years, really!?) ago, first on a borrowed C-64, later on MSX (Philips VG-8020) and MSX-2 (Philips VG-8235) computers. As those were the days when the first thing you saw after turning on the computer was the BASIC interpreter, naturally BASIC was the first programming language I learned. Assembler (Z80) was next. As I did not have an assembler back than, I hand-translated my first Assembler subroutines into machine code myself. The resulting machine code was then put into DATA statements in a BASIC program that POKE'd it into the memory to run it.
Learning BASIC as the first programming language turned out to be somewhat unwise later on when I turned to Turbo Pascal 3.0. It took some time to forget my bad habits of using GOTO. (BASIC dialects of the day had no loop statements beside FOR .. NEXT, which made excessive use of the GOTO statement unavoidable.)
Anyway, my relationship to BASIC was severely damaged in the late 1990s. As part of my job back then I took over maintenance of a "historically grown" Visual Basic application (fortunately, that lasted only for a few months and I also had a parallel C++ project to save my sanity). Needless to say the requirements for the application by far exceeded that what VB was designed for, so half of the code consisted of obscure work-arounds and dirty hacks (in the negative sense of the word). I stayed away from any kind of BASIC ever since.
Posted by guenter at December 31, 2004 12:18 AM