[Gambas-devel] Hit the users now, or forever be silent

[Benoit Minisini]

On Sunday 25 January 2004 00:40, Ahmad Kamal wrote:
> I couldn't believe my eyes, HBasic looks so good (haven't tried it yet)
>
> Take a look
> http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=10225
>
> It's also ver 0.9
>
> so way I see it, GB could really use some publicity now, or it would
> loose it's position as a really good language
>
>

I don't think that the quality of a language is a function of its publicity 
and its version number. Elsewhere, Microsoft Visual Basic would be the best 
language in the world.

Don't trust what you see! Go to the heart of things.

The author of HBasic made its language the way he wanted, and so I did. We 
have different goals.

You are in the world of free software, and free software users must not judge 
things with a consommer mentality, and understand the difference between 
competition and emulation.

For example, as HBasic can do automatic instruction completion, I will be 
pressed to it, but not because of the concurrency, but because it is cool, 
and users want it.

Even if you think the two languages are under the same "Visual-Basic" banner 
because of their external look, I'm sure they aren't. The technical 
differences between the two projects are huge. 

I am sure that Gambas and HBasic are totally different languages, almost like 
Perl and Python! (I can't confirm, because the last time I downloaded HBasic, 
I can't succeed in compiling it. Maybe I should retry?)

I'm sure that somebody can add a Visual-Basic like IDE to Perl and Python too. 
Then, who will be the better ?

If others VB-like languages fell down, it is just because their developers 
stopped worked on them, because they have no time, no more interest, or 
because the project was badly designed... I don't know. But surely not 
because they didn't have publicity!

If someone don't like Gambas, it is free not to use it. This is not a problem. 
Of course, I made Gambas because in my deep I think this is the "right" way to 
do a VB-like language. But I'm not completely stubborn, and I added many 
features requested by users. And so Gambas becomes the proprietary of its 
users too.

So if you want Gambas to have publicity, just do it :-) And if you want to 
compare the audience of the two languages, go to the statistic pages of 
sourceforge.

Regards,

P.S. Will you update the Arabic translation, Ahmad ? ;-) I find Gambas in 
arabic beautiful!

-- 
Benoit Minisini
mailto:gambas at ...1...