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Programming Operating Systems Software Windows Technology

Just BASIC 1.0 Beta 2 Released 63

Posted by timothy from the free-is-good dept.
Xampper writes "Just BASIC beta candidate 2 has just been released, and can be found at the JB website. The programming language is based on the popular Liberty BASIC language, and is a slightly watered down, but free, version. Standalone executables can be made, and the language is easy to grasp, especially for beginners." (Note, this is a Windows-specific language.)
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Just BASIC 1.0 Beta 2 Released More

Just BASIC 1.0 Beta 2 Released

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  • NEW (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:03PM (#10487551)
    10 PRINT "Who gives a fuck?"
    20 GOTO 10

    or

    10 WHILE -1
    20 PRINT "Who gives a fuck?"
    30 WEND

    for you structured people
    • Modern versions of Basic, such as Visual Basic, fully support structured programming and are more readable and safer than obscure, error-prone languages like C.


      • Sometimes at work I get handed a project written by "someone else" and asked to fix whatever's wrong with it.

        The few C/C++ projects I've done maint on were well constructed and well documented. Time and again, though it's spaghetti code written in VB or g0d help me VBA. I'm not saying you can't write a bad project in C/C++, but I have had exactly one VB project handed to me that I would call professionally done. There are a *lot* of crappy VB programmers out there.

        C is only error-prone if the develope

  • Yet... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Zx-man ( 759966 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:11PM (#10487598)
    ...there's nothing better than a good combination of the modern programming languages in a single project, let's say...
    A technically advanced BASIC console app with an supremely elegant and incredibly fast VisualCOBOL GUI warper attached to it?

  • Nice (Score:1)

    by priceb ( 629287 )
    Basic is a great learning languange. I am glad to see someone create a version that incorporates the simplicity of basic with the power to create usable applications. This is yet another chapter in one of the greatest programming languages.
    • BASIC (at least from my day) is not a great learning language. It is very much like old-fashioned FORTRAN. Evereything is very restrictive. There are only subroutines, no procedures or functions. There are no proper control structures, only IF THEN GOTO. Various implementations did fix certain shortcomings, but in general, BASIC is dreadful. Modern commercial BASICs aren't much better. Oh TrueBASIC, what became of you?
      • And what would procedures and functions be if not subroutines?

        (Note: many flavours of BASIC have functions in addition to subs these days...)

        You recall a BASIC without FOR? MBASIC in DOS 3.3 had FOR loops. Possibly WHILE too, but I can't be sure of it...

        And then there's


        I guess IHBT...
        • And what would procedures and functions be if not subroutines?

          Kemeny's (that was the guy's name, wasn't it?) BASIC didn't have FUNCTION and SUBs as we currently mean. Ours are a ALGOLism, I guess.

          Instead, you had:

          10 A=20
          20 GOSUB 100
          30 PRINT B$
          40 STOP
          100 B$="HELL"
          110 FOR I=1 TO A
          120 B$=B$+"O"
          130 RETURN

          That is, subroutines wasn't named, but called by its line number, had no neither parameters nor private variables.

      • Re:Nice (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Mr. Slippery ( 47854 )

        BASIC (at least from my day) is not a great learning language...There are only subroutines, no procedures or functions. There are no proper control structures, only IF THEN GOTO.

        That's exactly what makes it a great learning language. Write a medium-sized BASIC program and you learn why exactly more complex control structures and subroutines are desirable. It's one thing to talk about spaghetti code, it's another to have to try to untangle it.

        (A GOSUB is a type of procedure, BTW, and BASIC also has the

      • The problem with BASIC is that it does not consist of small things that can be orthogonally combined, which is one of the most important things to learn when you are learning programming.

        Each class of things (files, being the most horrid example) has its own syntax. Lists and other data structures are very weird to use.

        But it does have its moments.

  • RealBasic - visual basic that doesn't suck (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WasterDave ( 20047 ) <davep AT zedkep DOT com> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:23PM (#10487646)
    I used RealBasic for a project a couple of months ago and can assure you that it rules, thoroughly. A quick feature list:
    • Like Visual Basic but without the sucky bits
    • Appears to be a p-code language, will deploy to Mac (both kinds), Linux (gtk) or the other OS
    • Will remotely debug across platforms too
    • Proper, modern OO language
    • Astounding UI with the best tab completion ever

    So, it's not "free" in any meaning of the word, and is actually kinda expensive. But falls into the "if your time has any value" thing really quickly, especially if you want to produce something where performance is no biggie but getting a cross platform application bashed together for low cost is.

    Dave

    • Re:RealBasic - visual basic that doesn't suck (Score:5, Informative)

      by MadChicken ( 36468 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:36PM (#10487712) Homepage Journal
      I'd say the exact same things about .NET using SharpDevelop... except it's not *like* Visual Basic, it *is* Visual Basic. Not sure about the remote debugging across platforms though...

      Between the 100% free(beer)ness of .NET SDK + SharpDevelop or JDK+NetBeans (or Eclipse) I'm not sure why I should even bother downloading this?

      (I looked at the prices for RealBasic - yikes! I'll deal with the sucky bits for that price -- of course, considerably cheaper than VS.NET, but I'm talking personal use here...)
    • Its UI is nowhere near Visual Studio. You can't even view an entire module's code inside a single window. Maybe its good compared to visual basic 4, but anything beyond that smokes it. I should say that its actually the easiest and maybe best way to develop on a Mac, but for windows it doesn't get any better than .Net. Also beware of its cross platform capabilites. Often you will find yourself needing an extention ( sort of like a dll) and those are written in native code and are not cross platform. But if

  • Learn Python instead. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:46PM (#10487750)
    Seriously. I learned Basic when I was a kid, but if I could be a kid again, I would have learned Python instead (if it had been invented then). the limitations of Basic (no pointers, etc), give it serious problems with anything but low end programs. It certainly has no place in modern commercial development. Visual Basic programmers might disagree, but it's my experience that you're all brutally retarded anyway.

    Basic might be good for beginning programmers to get a brief overview of how to code, but before long I would expect them to move onto a better, more capable language before it gives them bad habbits and slows them down. C is a complex language, but Python is exactly right for learners - it's complicated and hugely capable if you want it to be, but is quite capable of small projects and is forgiving for learners.

    * Python [python.org] - A modern, neet-o general purpose language.
    * Psyco [sourceforge.net] - Runtime compiler.
    * Py2Exe [python.net] - Converts Python scripts to Windows executables.
    * Pythonwin [python.org] - Windows extensions (and an excellent code editor).

    (I want to recommend learning assembler for beginners, since you'll understand exactly what's going on, but almost nobody cares about it these days.. sigh..)

    • Re:Learn Python instead. (Score:4, Funny)

      by CaptainCheese ( 724779 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @05:38PM (#10488028) Journal
      I learned how to code 6502 assembler at school. It's a bit weird now I come to think of it, but I did. Never did me any harm. Didn't help, though.

    • Re:Learn Python instead. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MadChicken ( 36468 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @06:42PM (#10488426) Homepage Journal
      Uh, lack of pointers is a *bad* thing somehow??? And remember Basic != BASIC... Try loading up a C# program in SharpDevelop and running the "Convert to VB" option... it's just syntax.

      Maybe you're so grumpy because some people can actually make money programming in VB? Modern commercial development is hugely VB based. If you said modern ACADEMIC development, I might have had *some* respect for everything else you said. VB up to V6 is a kludgy, clumsy language. VB.NET is considerably different -- it had to be to survive.

      I'd still vote for Java for a first language. You actually learn things you will use in later development.
    • the limitations of Basic (no pointers, etc),

      And you need pointers with python? One reason it's an easy language is you don't need them, nor do you need malloc and suchlike. Not that Basic's lack of pointers makes it a great language, far from it: it lacks too much else, it looks like assembly language without the power of assembly language...

    • I agree with the parent post. If you want to learn a powerful, interpreted, object-oriented, easy-to-use programming language, then choose Python.

      I would suggest that you use wxPython [wxpython.org] instead of Pythonwin though. Apps written with wxPython look like native Windows applications, but have the added advantage of being compatible with other operating systems too.
    • I agree that Python is a much better language than BASIC. But to say BASIC has no place in today's world shows more ignorance than anything else.

      I can't even begin to name the tons of business applications that have been developed with some dialect of BASIC - from PICK Basic to Business Basic to QuickBasic to VB - there have been many, many successful, fast, and very capable business applications built using this language.

      All it is is a syntax: what is the difference if it is "FOR...NEXT" or "for (...){}"?

  • Whom the gods would destroy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:58PM (#10487806)
    They first teach basic.

    Seriously is there any use for this except as a teaching tool ? If thats the only use isn't it an incredibly bad idea ?

    There are plenty of great languages that can be learned quickly, teach fundamental computer science painlessly and are free. PERL, PYTHON, LOGO, if you r'e anal all the Pascal variants. These not only serve the purpose of allowing programs to be written but they painlessly impart good technique.
    • Sorry to be pedantic, but why did you lowercase "basic", but capitalize "PERL, PYTHON, LOGO"? It's supposed to be the other way around.

      That aside, I agree with you. Especially about Python (it's my favorite).

      TTFN
    • the absolute most important benefit of BASIC, to both beginners and advanced programmers, in almost every form since QBASIC, is that you are able to break out of the interpreter into the source, change things (fix a bug, modify a loop, whatever), and then re-enter the running (interpreted) program *WITH NO DATA LOSS*. i am not a guru by any means, but im fluent enough to do a lot better than 'hello world' in about a dozen languages, and i have never encountered a non-BASIC language with this feature.

      PS: c
      • I was quite suprised when I switched from Visual Basic (forgive me please, I'm an Engineer) to C# that I could no longer re-code whilst debugging.

        It was a bit of a shame really, albeit inspiring me to program better in the first place.

    • ALL YOUR BASIC ARE BELONG TO US!!!

      Also, PASCAL is also a learning-only language... I think C or C++ in high school is a relatively recent development. Most of the guys I went to college with had the same story as me... first BASIC (which most of us had already played with on our Atari 400s or whatever), then PASCAL (which we all hated).

      Never messed with Python, but I agree that it would probably be better to throw students right in the deep end and get them coding in C. The biggest reason being to teach
      • C and/or C++ in high schools *hasn't developed yet*. Right now I'm in high school. Because I listened when they dragged us in and told us about the various courses, I picked up that the Programming class dealt with Pascal. I was able to avoid and continue on my way with C and/or C++ (whatever fits the situation), but my friend got caught. The biggest danger is that someone (like my unsuspecting friend) will actually like PASCAL.
      • Never messed with Python, but I agree that it would probably be better to throw students right in the deep end and get them coding in C.

        The trouble with teaching C first is that there are many things about C which are not good for newbies. For example, how long would it take for you to explain the following C program to a person who knew nothing about programming?

        #include <stdio.h>
        int main(int argc, char ** argv)
        {
        printf("Hello, World!\n");
        return 0;
        }

        Now, how long would it take to explain the

  • so just leave it for teaching. It has been said that they shipped BASIC with DOS because that was the only langauge that Bill Gates understood...
  • I think that any software development tool that liberates people from being users to active developers is a good thing.

    I know that BASIC does not appeal to the Slashdot crowd, but what about those people who have never programmed before? If this program helps a few people write a small program or two on their own, I think it is a great deal.

    Personally, I am excited by the Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E) [python.org] proposal that Guido van Rossum proposed a while back. I think everybody in the modern, west
    • I must admit that I don't know enough about all languages involved, but C like syntax is pretty widespread, so wouldn't some descendant of C that has decent string handling be best ?

      I know nothing is optimal, but consider leaving out the complicated parts of C++, or even javascript and maybe php or Java, or really a subset of C++ with Classes that make the GUI stuff easy.
      • Why bother? The point is not to teach them industry skills, but rather to impart on people "a rudimentary, working knowledge of computer programming", so why hobble them with ugly, broken, inconsistent syntax? Why not use a language which has had teaching in mind [squeakland.org] from the get-go? After all, there's a reason things like Logo, Basic, and Hypercard are/were popular... because they're easy to learn and it's easy to produce really cool things quickly and with relatively little effort.\
  • Just basic is just a watered down free as in free beer version of a commercal product as far as I can see.

    I found a really free GNU version of Liberty basic [sourceforge.net] through a simple search through google.... just FYI.

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