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Judging by the responses to similar questions for PBWin and
others i dont rate your chance of a definite date. I have
just purchased PBDOS so i'm not in a hurry for an immediate
up-date myself. I dont mind when they update really, what would
matter more to me is a program that runs with as few flaws as possible
and i have to say that the products from Powerbasic are right on the nose.
No doubt there are the occasional workarounds but this is a small
price to pay for good software.
When i read you post you were so straight to the point that it
actually made me laugh.
I think I first heard about PB for Linux more than 4 years ago. I'm not holding my breath waiting for it. Realisticly Linux doesn't represent that huge of a market for PB Inc. In Linux it is very difficult to make money selling a tool as basic as a compiler. The days of making money selling development environments are numbered. Already MS is giving away a light version of Visual Studio .NET to would-be C# programmers. There is no migration path from PB/Windows to PB/Linux (win32 api doesn't have any direct equivalents in the linux world) and using PB as a cgi language under linux probably wouldn't be successful as CGI is falling out of fashion these days. Perhaps a mod_pb would handy. In my day to day work, I find myself using compiled languages less and less (even java and C# fall into that category). Dynamic languages such as php, python, and perl are being used for more and more things.
The things that PB would need to be successful under Linux would also make it hard to sell PB/Linux to existing PB customers because it would be difficult adapt to the compiler agnostic world that Linux developers use. For example, PB/Linux would have to generate standard object files (linkable with the GNU linker), import standard system shared libraries, and be GUI toolkit agnostic. It doesn't make much sense to build the GUI stuff into the language since there are already several very good toolkits that people use that could easily be wrapped in PB and PB bindings created. A command-line compiler is pretty much a must. A good debugger too. Instead of producing an IDE for windows or Linux, PB should instead just produce an Eclipse-based IDE component. Eclipse is by far one of the best IDEs ever designed. GUI programming seems to be more and more object-oriented, so having object-oriented constructs will also be necessary. The thing I currently find most frustrating is that PB currently has almost all the constructs you need to program in an object-oriented fashion. The only it is currently missing is function pointers. You need those to implement virtual method tables. Technically most of the OO stuff in C++ is just syntactic sugar. I write in C using GTK+ which is object-oriented in every way. Also missing is support for templates, which makes possible type-safe containers.
At one time I started on a PB to C++ translator. Such a project is still quite doable. PowerBASIC can be translated fairly directly into C or C++. The emulating the runtime proves to be a bit of a challenge.
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[This message has been edited by Michael Torrie (edited August 27, 2004).]
I'm definitely not holding my breathe. Being realistic,
there isn't much of a market for PB on any platform. As far
as the arguement for making money, well that could be made for
every software package under Linux, not just compilers. Sure C,
Perl, Python and others are great, but what they lack is the draw
of those that have been using Basic in the industry since 1979.
I definitely am not going to learn C or Java when Pascal and Basic
have been doing just fine for my needs. Yes, OO programming is
great, but ever notice has bad programming has been put into classes,
just like the bad programming of subroutines and functions.
The market is definitely changing, but I am sure that companies
like PowerBasic are going to be able to provide low cost tools
and charge for support help. Strange as it may seem this is not
a new concept. I've worked with consulting companies that have
been doing it for years. The profits are made from support, not
the software.
So many people get caught up in the buzz about migration paths.
I can't number the times I've converted a company from one
platform to another, without the need to convert their old
software, not that you aren't right and that some people do
export software from one to another. The idea of one langauge,
multiple platforms. There are languages like Lazarus (Pascal)
that do support for both Windows and Linux graphics.
There are other markets, such as Business Basic, from Transoft,
which refuse to offer the ability to code on more than one Linux
platform, as they tie their security code to the kernel. This
is so 1970's. Even others want to keep a library and learn a
javascript to front-end their code.
What is missing from Linux is what PB could offer. An easy,
powerful language. Using the library that exist under Linux
for graphics, etc, wouldn't be a drawback, it would be an
advantage to PB's powerful language syntax. The same as xbase
language made record access to a database, with a simple one
line command, rather than a screen full of text to simply say
I want to draw a window.
In the end the PB people will do what they feel is best. We all
have our feelings on what we need and that's what makes the
software market great.
Barry Erick said:
>>
>> [there isn't any market for PB in any platform]
>>
>> Gee.. I guess you don't know that PB for DOS and Windows
>> is very sucessful.
>>
Did you bother to read all that I said? I don't believe that
there isn't a market. Michael Torrie, said, "Linux doesn't
represent that huge of a market for PB." I was being sarcastic.
I think PowerBasic is highly innovative and needed for Linux.
It's just to bad that so many people think C, C#, Perl, Python,
and a host of others are modern, more powerful, easy to use,
blah, blah the arguements go on and on. Will people pay for it?
Yes, I'd pay for it. Will businesses pay for it? I'm sure there
are lots of businesses still using PB. Does PB need to have
businesses paying for it? Maybe, maybe not. It's great to have
an easy syntax language, with power. To learn and use to write
utilities and applications. Should it do CGI, support it's own
screen writing library. That's a question PB Inc needs to ask.
I'm happy if PB Linux uses the open source libraries and
keeps it's current power and functionality. Obviously there
are people that feel they can make money with Basic under Linux
see PureBasic, KBasic (which hasn't been released yet.) and
RealBasic. Myself, I'd rather buy from a company that I know
there past record for support and stablity in their software.
I know that if PB Inc releases a PB for Linux that it will be
a product that will turn heads and people will say, "There
really is a reason to leave DOS."
Maybe not, but it will be another impressive product.
[This message has been edited by J Ward (edited September 07, 2004).]
The biggest demand for PB/Linux I could see is people wanting to take their software from DOS to Linux for whatever reason. This is quite doable. Whether it would make money is another story. The secondary demand would come from those developers who hit their stride in DOS but never followed the windows rush (who can blame them). Linux represents the dream OS in many ways. A modern 32-bit DOS where all the old DOS skills still work very well. Command line apps are still okay! This describes me precisely.
You were being sarcastic when you said that PB doesn't have that big of a market share on any platform. Unfortunately, you are correct. PB rules its niche markets very well, but broadly speaking, PB has a very small share compared to the great monopoly, Microsoft. Despite all the hype about C# (which really is an awesome language), MS is pushing VB.net in a huge way. I expect VB.Net to dominate web-delivered applications on the MS platform over the next few years. With .Net finally becoming a real and viable platform, I expect Basic as well as C# to become a language of choice for the majority of developers in the near future. With the progress made on the Mono project (a GPL'd implementation of the .NET virtual machine and common runtime on Linux), perhaps PB would be wise to merely concentrate on making PB target the .NET virtual machine. Then we'd have portability for free. Like MS or hate them, .Net is a powerful and good thing. And it will replace the Win32 api as we know it now. Another alternative once talked about very prominently on the front page of the PB web site was the notion of targetting the Java virtual machine. PB/Java. What ever happened to that idea? Now that JIT VM technology is proving fast and capable, such an idea has great merit.
Hey, Michael-- have you heard of PB/CC? The PowerBASIC Console Compiler
for Windows is quite suited to producing command-line apps in a 32-bit
Windows environment. You can bring your DOS skills along. Of course,
PB/DOS still works under every version of Windows to date. Of course,
there have been rumors of DOS support disappearing from Windows... for
the last decade or so. If it ever really happens, there's always DOSEMU.
Broadly speaking, everyone has a very small share of the market, compared
to Microsoft. Errr... so?
As far as .NET goes, it's true that Microsoft has been pushing it very
hard, for many years, now. Unfortunately, it's a solution that doesn't
actually provide any new features, while requiring you to throw away all
of your existing programs and programming tools. It doesn't actually seem
to be catching on, very well.
We get lots of requests for PB/Linux, PB/Win64, PB/WinCE, PB/Palm, PB/Mac,
and PB/(any number of other platforms). There has been negligible interest
in a PB/.NET. That's not a product we're liable to pursue unless a lot more
people evince some sort of interest in it.
And that brings us back to DOS! DOS, an OS, a female OS... oh, never mind.
Probably, the most interesting aspect of PB/DOS programming, these days, is
for dedicated controllers and embedded systems. Projects that would formerly
have been done with extremely low-level chips are now, often, handled with
hardware (and software) that was originally designed for general-purpose
computing. This is an increasing part of the PB/DOS market.
I guess everything is relative. .NET demand is picking up dramatically in industry, although not necessarily among your current target audience apparently. For web development, though, .NET (and Java) are majorly in demand these days. Most of that is probably due to PHB's not really understanding what it is, but that they got to have it!
I will never use PB/CC, since I am not interested in developing on Windows period. My current toolset includes C, C++, Python, C#, and Java, all of which (when care is taken in developing) allow me to develop to my hearts content on linux and then port to Windows (quite successfully for the few programs I've ported). For me developing on Windows alone is a dead-end, since there is no path to port to other operating systems. Even PB/CC, while mostly compatible with PB/DOS, is not truely the same language. PB/Win, PB/CC and PB/DOS are fundementally different animals.
I am interested in PB/Linux, however, if and only if it meets the requirements I have set out previously on many occasions (compatibility with existing libraries and toolkits, linkers, etc).
I expect VB.Net to dominate web-delivered applications on the MS platform over the next few years.
This could be true, I'm not really sure. However, MS has a minority share of Web servers (Apache still #1) and they're share is shrinking each year. For the first time in their history, I think MS actually missed the boat on Web technology thinking they could bully their way in like they have done in so many other areas. However, with a new crop of people (who don't have the bad remembrances of the 60's and 70's versions of Unix) Linux is a fine platform to work in and .net is totally unnecessary (not to mention undesired). So from my point of view, .net will never reach critical mass and will be relegated to the 'junior level' programmers who need WYSIWYG type of tool.
I hope your right about MS's web market share. As for .NET, love it or hate it, it *is* MS's next-generation API. Therefore it will become *the* platform for all windows development over the next 5 years. The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding, and that I believe is MS Office. If and when Office is relased as a .NET product (ie mostly written in C# and the CLR), then we'll know that .NET truly will be MS's preferred platform. This is rapidly going off topic, so I'll just end by saying that .NET is a brilliant move on the part of microsoft, since it finally gives them mobility and freedom from intel (should they need it), and freedom from a mess of legacy APIs that are starting to really become a liability for MS in many areas of which security is a major one.
I was talking to a guy at work about the DOS days gone by.
I said "What we need is a 32bit DOS that has large drive
support and networking built in".
I realized I had just described Linux.
My wish for PB/Linux would be CGI funtionality with built in
ODBC database connectivity or even a PowerTree type
of index solution built in or available as a 3rd party.
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