[Gambas-user] Happy new year 2024!

[Admin]

You know, trough the years I think what's really important in UNIX world 
for the people beginning to write software is if their program would 
execute without, how do I put it, any other "body movements". Most 
distros, not even just Linux distros, allow you to just write a program 
using vi/ee/mcedit and just run it, because python is already there, 
perl is already there, C and C++ is already there (gcc and make that is).

Oh boy do I dream of having Gambas installed by default in distros. But 
for example in a corporate distro my employer uses - it is. And so there 
you go, all mine and my colleagues software on any "work PC" just works. 
This is what makes language popular, my colleagues see that they can 
choose and they choose. They choose Gambas, so do I.

For a long time I had to administer a lot of FreeBSD routers in all 
corners of country due to other admins in my company not really being 
familiar with FreeBSD but mostly just being used to web-interfaces of, 
say, OpenWRT. They are just Windows users, so what else to expect. And 
then Gambas (somewhere since 3.14) suddenly started to successfully 
compile on a "naked" FreeBSD 12/13/14. So there we go, I am not a web 
programmer by any means, but since we have xrdp, I just wrote a router 
control panel in Gambas and made it the only thing to run when you log 
in via Remote Desktop to a FreeBSD router, and voila, Windows admins now 
took their routers administation from me and I breathe freely for more 
then a year now.

The only problem left is that with every new FreeBSD router installed I 
have to compile Gambas on it and pray every time that it succeeds. 
Frequently It does not, so I "dance with a ritual drum" to make it 
bloody work, but when I finally compile the damn thing, no more work for 
me, the other guys will take it from here. Imagine if Gambas was just a 
binary package in a FreeBSD repository. I would save probably a week of 
personal time annually.

So there. I think the popularity begins not with a Foundation or an 
advertisment. It begins with binary packages in a default repository of 
at least all of slightest popular UNIX-like distros. When I write a 
script in Python, I know that the guy using Sun Solaris just like the 
guy using MacOS X would successfully execute it. Before this confidence 
exists for Gambas it's hard to even recommend it to somebody outside of 
a microworld where you by yourself already ensured that the program they 
write will actually run.

Dmitry.

03.01.2024 6:43, Jussi Lahtinen пишет:
> Over the years I have tried to recommend and advertise Gambas. Usually 
> people who are interested are the ones who were using Visual Basic. If 
> they didn't hear about Gambas on time, then I think most of them 
> adopted some completely different language. Mostly Python..? That was 
> also one of my options back then, but idiotic things like whitespace 
> as syntax kept me away from it. And some people *still* insist that it 
> is a good thing, as it forces good indentation. In Gambas that 
> "problem" is fixed in a second by a click of a button on the IDE. No 
> need for daily suffering for it. Then pip, conda, etc... what a mess, 
> none of them offer a simple, reliably working system. Did I mention 
> that Python is also slow? And does it still lack decent GUI building 
> tools, anything even close to what Gambas IDE has?
>
> It's a cross platform language which supports Windows. I think that is 
> probably the only reason (and irrelevant to me) why it was so widely 
> adopted. And now it has a huge community, which offers reliability for 
> its long term success, lots of libraries, etc benefits. So, in some 
> parts the ship has sailed. However, Gambas really can have a bright 
> future, simply because it is great. I think for the needed wider 
> audience, Gambas would need native support for Android or some other 
> other popular OS.
> Not necessarily a fun task.
>
>
> Jussi
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 2, 2024 at 5:16 PM Benoît Minisini 
> <benoit.minisini at gambas-basic.org> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     Let's start the new year with an article that quotes Gambas:
>
>     https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and
>
>     « Let’s forget about the past and look at what we have today in
>     TUI-land. I don’t want to look at GUIs because… well, Visual Basic
>     was
>     the pinnacle of graphics programming and we don’t have that either
>     anymore—which is also a topic for another day. (Well, OK, you have
>     Gambas… but who knows about it?) »
>
>     Mmmm... I know that nobody knows about Gambas, but apparently the
>     main
>     quality of a language seems to be how many people know about it.
>     How a
>     quantity could be a quality?
>
>     Anyway, I wish everyone an happy new year, and a lot of graces for
>     you
>     and your relatives.
>
>     Best regards,
>
>     -- 
>     Benoît Minisini.
>
>     ----[ http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/netiquette ]----
>
>
> ----[http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/netiquette  ]----

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