Is BASIC dead ?

[dsicon]

are we a dying breed here ? (BASIC)

seems that the forum is very slow, it was not always this way

i mentioned PBP to a younger colleague (in his early 30's) he did not seem to really know what BASIC was at all although he had heard of it, he is well educated

other than the often encountered snobbery about BASIC just wonder what the prognosis is ?

i find PBP to be a wonderful tool for us who do not do programming full time and are hardware oriented

i have seem some of the younger generations pound their keyboard for days trying to solve something when pulling out a meter or scope or magnifier and actually looking at the circuit might have instead solved the issue in moments

[Heckler]

I hope not
But I fear the worst.

I love BASIC... I bought a PCjr in ~85 and used to hand type programs in from magazines.

I really think the folks over at melabs should/could do a better job of publicizing their product and getting the word out and posting projects and code snippets to keep it alive.

Possibly it was doomed from the start with the choice of the name "BASIC" (kinda puts it at a disadvantage with other languages that are not so "BASIC", regardless of how powerful the language actually is.

PBP produces pretty efficient code as far as I know.

I doubt there are many new coders that are choosing BASIC as the starting point for their new programming career.

just my .02

others thoughts??

dwight

[Demon]

Betamax was better than VHS and look what happened there.

Marketting is key. Arduino has a lot of visibility to the public.

Robert

[Archangel]

It's not dead as long as M E Labs continues to add new part numbers to the library. The main advantage to "C" is you can write code for an Atmel chip and carry most of it over to a PIC or (name your micro). C is pretty much C and Basic s have so many flavors. This Basic was designed to vacuum up all the Stamp users into using PICs without the high price of "postage"

As for diminished traffic in here, we have suffered some tremendous losses in terms of pure talent as of late. The loss of Darrel Taylor is gut wrenching, Melanie never comes here anymore, where the heck is Mister_E , and BRUCE ? These 4 were instrumental in teaching many of us to program, period. Others of note, Sayzar taught me to use timers . . . and more. It will take time to develop new superstars and with luck maybe some of our old friends will return.

[richard]

I have noticed that the sale of pbp3 licences (silver at $25us) are pretty slow, maybe it is dead.
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/pic-b...bs-30-off.html
pbp3 excels at tight fast code for 8bit core pics ,but much more feature rich and powerful chips are so cheap now that "bloatware" is not just restricted to the pc market . people are happy to use a 16mips atmel-mega328 with 2k of ram and 32k flash to blink a few leds.
waste waste waste. what happened to using the right tool for the job (just kidding ) @< $5 a chip why not kill it to death

[Dave]

I for one have to agree, A friend showed me an Arduino schetch that took an A/D reading and sent it out to the comm port and after it was compiled it took 17552 bytes of memory. WOW what bloat....

[longpole001]

well 128k limitation is real , not upward path past it ,