About thinBasic

[ErosOlmi]

Thread splitted from http://community.thinbasic.com/index.php?topic=1037.0

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Can you tell me how many active thinBasic language developers (authors) there are? Will thinBasic become open source at some point?


Hi John,

well, I like your way to push. Some can feel it as a little irritating but here ... no, be sure. I perfectly know you do it for improving something you consider have potentialities, and I'm happy abut that.

Going into the matter, thinBasic already cover almost 90% of the potential market: Windows market. The rest is about 5 to 8% for Apple, remaining is *nix world. We are happy to already cover the biggest part. Ref: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8&qpmr=100&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=Y or http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

Also considering that many very good languages covering multiple platforms didn't had big success, let me think that going multiple platform is not the key point to have success. So I prefer to concentrate on one platform. That said from one side I'm very open to listen to everyone suggestions but on the other side I need to keep thinBasic development very straight.

Regarding open source I do not think it is the way. Sources are our power, our creation. It is important for us to keep them safe. Releasing them will give no extra power to anyone other than people wanting to copy it. Copyright? A beautiful (and hated) word that you you will be able to protect only if you will have big money and we do not sell thinBasic so we have no money to protect our copyright.
But we are not close to community development. For this reason we develop a big and complete set of function interfaces that let everyone to develop thinBasic modules with the many supported languages: PowerBasic, FreeBasic, C, ASM, ... Just to give you the idea of the power of thinBasic SDK interface, all modules use this SDK: TBGL for OpenGL, UI module for User Interface (just to list two of the most complex modules). But also thinBasic Debugger is developed as module and this can give you the idea of how deep a module can go into thinBasic Core engine.

Ok, this is what I had to say on the matter. I will later split some post of this thread in order not to break original post.

Ciao
Eros

[John Spikowski]

Eros,

Thanks for getting me up to speed with where you are with thinBasic and your views for the long term.

I'm not here to derail anything or cause ill will. You know me as someone that calls it like I see it without the sugar coating.

Thanks for allowing me to participate.

John

[ErosOlmi]

I know John. For some aspect I like your way and I like your "no sugar" way.
I always prefer people telling me what they think directly.
Ciao
Eros

[John Spikowski]

Eros,

To help me better understand thinBasic without having to read the docs in detail, I have a question that would help me better understand the Basic. (putting the compiler vs interpreter issue aside)

If I were an application programmer that just discovered thinBasic and while reading the docs I noticed it was written with PowerBasic. What is the advantages of using thinBasic over PowerBasic if all I care about is getting my application to run?

John

[ErosOlmi]

Thread splitted and moved in order not to crash original thread.

[ErosOlmi]

If I were an application programmer that just discovered thinBasic and while reading the docs I noticed it was written with PowerBasic. What is the advantages of using thinBasic over PowerBasic if all I care about is getting my application to run?


Well,

1) I do not think a programmer just care his/her application is running. If your application is more than few lines of code, you will care about how it is written, how to implement it, how to improve with new functionalities. If your application is important for you you will carefully choose the dev tool you use to develop it (considering many factors).

2) thinBasic is not in competition with any compiler.PowerBasic is just the compiler we use to develop thinBasic but it could have being onother.
As you well know interpreters and compilers cover very different aspects. I would never develop a DB engine with an interpreter or a spreadsheet or I cannot develop a DLL with and interpreted language. But I would develop with an interpreter some kind of games, system utilities, tasks automation, applications dealing with databases, data conversions, data exchange, ...

3) an interpreter have many functions that with just one line of code can do things that with a compiler would require many lines. So for many kind of applications an interpreter can do a lot of difference regarding the time an utility con go into production. For example in the company I work for, for many on the fly needs on DB and on system handling we use thinBasic and in few minutes we have the job done. On the other side a Compiler creates much much faster executable that an interpreted.

I could go on with different aspects but I would enter into too much detailed description. Also consider that there are programmers that will never go with an interpreted language and I can understand them. I only think that the tool you can use can vary depending on the task you need to achieve. thinBasic is just one of the many tools you can choose from for some of those tasks.

Ciao
Eros

[ErosOlmi]

Maybe some thinBasic users can say for what kind of applications they are using thinBasic for.
It could be very interesting. Maybe I will create a poll.