Is BASIC dead ?

[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....

[Ioannis]

WOW what bloat....

Yes, but is dead easy for anyone to do it. Ready made libraries and you do not have to do anything but hit compile and program...

Fun is lost...

Ioannis

[andywpg]

In my case, I used to program in assembler, but I wasn't comfortable with it. I could get the job done....eventually. I tried 'C' and just didn't like it. I've been programming with BASIC since I was 15 (a LONG time ago) and PBP allows me to write code fast - and spend more time playing with the new toy I made!

I, for one, will be using it as long as I can........