[Gambas-user] BASIC Legacy [WAS: Look for Gambas tutorials]

[David Reese]

Rob wrote:
> Since Visual Basic is the most common BASIC dialect in history by at 
> least an order of magnitude, I think it's kind of a moot point. But 
> yes, people who have been using non-object-oriented BASIC dialects 
> before coming to Gambas will have a learning curve, just as they would 
> if they tried to use VB, Realbasic, RapidQ or any other modern 
> incarnation of it. Or, for that matter, Java or Javascript or 
> Actionscript or Python or any .NET-hosted language.
Yeah, I'm showin' my age, I guess.  Of all the procedural BASIC 
dialects, I actually liked QuickBasic best.  It was a compilable 
language which could also be executed immediately - gave me lots of room 
to play around with the code.  The QB help facilities were killer, too.  
BASIC had been the one thing Microsoft had consistently done well in my 
limited experience.  (Applesoft BASIC made Bill Gates his first million 
dollars.)
> In fact, unless you're doing C, Perl or COBOL, chances are you're 
> going to have to gain a grasp on object oriented programming to 
> do anything in the computing environments that are en vogue 
> right now, and even those languages have all kinds of object 
> extensions bolted on to them (sure, Gtk may be C-based, but it's 
> certainly object oriented.)
I'm finding that out, but a lot of the Linux kernel is still maintained 
in C, as is a large body of GNU software.  Knowing C will be valuable to 
me if I am going to stick with a Linux environment.  I'll probably keep 
trying to learn Ruby and Gambas, too - each language out there has its 
place.

As for OOP:  I'll probably bash my head against a stone wall until I 
look up bloodied and bruised one day and go, "Aha!".  Until then, my 
grasp of the demarcations of objects in a program looms before me as 
that wall.  I can code from hell to breakfast, I just can't design OO 
programs worth beans, and good programs are all about good fundamental 
designs.  I have read (and continue to read) everything I can get my 
hands on about OOP and OOD, but, with my time constraints being what 
they presently are, I don't know that I will ever learn enough to be a 
truly good programmer in an OO language.
>   
> Apart from a few legacy apps, procedural BASIC is really only 
> used for embedded applications anymore, and what we now 
> call "BASIC" is more like VB or Gambas than 
>
> 10 PRINT "I am overflowing the stack now" : GOSUB 10
>
> And I'm thinking that if you search for BASIC tutorials, you'll 
> find mostly stuff that starts with "Sub Main" or "Sub Form_Open" 
> than something that looks like the above.  So it wasn't out of 
> line for Sebastian to recommend general BASIC tutorials to 
> Johnny, though I personally would not have done so.
>   
You're quite right.  QuickBasic and QBasic (it's interpreted cousin 
which shipped with MS-DOS 5[?] and later) had gotten away from the line 
numbers and gone to a more structured approach, with great emphasis on 
proper use of subroutines to implement cleaner and more maintainable code.

I didn't mean to imply that Sebastian was out of line recommending 
"general BASIC tutorials".  I just wanted Johnny to know that not all 
BASICs are created equal, and that the best resources for learning 
Gambas are going to be those which are specific to it.  That is why I 
tried to provide a few of the more introductory links to the 
documentation and to the tutorials I have worked through so far.

(It's been a long week for me, and I might not have come across 
properly.  I didn't mean to give offense, really.)

Tomorrow's another day.  I'll go back to lurking again now, while I learn.

Later On,
Dave