PowerBASIC

[José Roca]

I should have added @John at the beginning.

[JRS]

I can't understand your obsession with PowerBasic. It is not normal.

Do you really believe that if PB is abandoned the PBer's will come here in masse? Or it doesn't matter to you as long as PB disappears...

I hate seeing good people being played for suckers. Zale was dishonest and cheap.

[José Roca]

I don't agree and, anyway, he is dead. You can't do him any harm, but you can do harm to this forum.

[JRS]

This forum is about an open source BASIC compiler and the brilliant author behind it. PB isn't even in the same class.

The forum isn't moderated and members are free to express their views without retribution.

[Karen Zibowski]

PowerBasic is already an abandonware,  there is little need to talk about it.   

[Aurel]

I can't understand your obsession with PowerBasic. It is not normal.

Heh Jose
that is our John superSpikowski 

alright John 

[Arnold]

As a hobby programmer I do not care much about special programming languages. After I retired I used OxygenBasic to learn the principles of programming and thanks to the patience of Charles and Mike I think I already learned some of the basics. But this happened by chance. Perhaps I could also have started using Freebasic, FBSL, Powerbasic, ThinBasic, PellesC or another programming language.
Searching in Internet I learned that Bob Zale was a businessman who tried to market a product which he developed. I do not see anything wrong with this. I can also not see that he did harm to anybody. And there are many PB users who are happy to use the language.
So I do not really understand this (personel) confrontation.

Zale was dishonest and cheap.

This is a serious accusation. Can this statement be proven? Or should I consider this as fake news?

Roland

[JRS]

All Bob Zale left Vivian was debit and a hacked DOS BASIC compiler that only Bob could compile. He cheated Eric and others out of their royalty payments and was too cheap to give the beta testers a free copy. Zale would rather cut off a finger than give a copy of his BASIC away.

[José Roca]

I was a beta tester for the 9 and 10 versions and I got free copies. What happens is that not everybody that participated deserved them, since they did very little or nothing.

[JRS]

The only reason I stuck around as long as I did was because of the amazing effort you put into your includes to make PowerBASIC usable. Sad PB users didn't support your efforts.

I think you would have better luck with O2 and working with Charles. If I haven't said it recently, thank you for the time and effort you invested making COM and SDK programming understandable.

[chrisc]

I'm a begiiner programmer, so when i join the PB forum, i was hounded and abuse by some dogs users
who couldn't stand me for asking simple questions.  how am i to learn the language when these PB users
started to abuse me for nothing and out of nowhere. so instead of friendly advice they did the opposite

How is PB going to survive if these users attack beginners, and without beginners there would be little sales!

That's why i came to O2 and my boss was very supportive as he wants to convert his PB 32bit programs to
O2 64 bits, he has given up on PB not bcos of PB is not a good compiler but bcos of the current PB users
who are not supportive but instead abuse new members and beginners like myself.  additionally the
32 bit  is near the end of the road and dying

[AnthonCom]

 Look at it this way, PB users, if you want to fry an egg you would need to break its shell.
 Of course there would be some collateral  damage in the advancement process,  if PB
 doesn't evolve  or  doesn't move forward,   it is  as good as dead.

There is an African proverb "When you are drowning, you must swim faster to get to the shore" 
which means that if you are in hard times, then you must work harder, let others sleep while
you work, by the time they get up you will be on the shore.

PB must work harder if it wants to survive.

[Charles Pegge]

Hi Anthon,

Welcome to our forum, which as you can see, gets occasionally boisterous

[JRS]

In summation, PowerBASIC's legacy is an author with an enormous ego consumed by greed.

[JRS]

Will the world wait for PowerBASIC to catch up? Single person closed source legacy products aren't in high demand. Zale syndrome.

Without getting into quoting many pieces of prior posts, I will try to address most everything here.

I don't mind sharing the roadmap that I am on - because I think I can do that and still hold to what Bob used to describe as "no vapourware".

I absolutely believe in what Bob's vision about the compiler, in fact I found out my plan prior to our acquiring the products actually lines up with part of what Bob wanted to do, according to conversations with Vivian.

Step 1 is to translate the compiler into PowerBASIC itself. After that, I plan to do what I would call a "maintenance release" - in other words, when we get there, fix any and all issues I can find, and make that available to users.

Once that is complete, move forward with future development, which we all know I would be foolish to think that 64 bit doesn't need to be the next step.

I have hit speed bumps along the way - one of which was getting a stomach bug twice (or possibly flu once) in March and missing 3 weeks of work. All is good now, but that makes it hard to even keep up with support emails. The other simply with the sake of being transparent is the translation is a much bigger task than I envisioned it being from the outset.

My near future plans don't really include trying to add much to the compiler - but simply to do what I have described above.

I actually have acquired a URL and had started work on creating a blog prior to getting sick in March and that just fell by the wayside for a bit, and I'm now trying to circle back around to it. It probably won't be WordPress - as I have almost completed a bit of a blogging CMS in PB that will generate the output file(s) for upload. I won't really have a commenting feature on it because I don't want to try to manage the security issues related to that - but I will be pushing that content to social media when I get it launched and can facilitate discussion there, and I may be able to get the forum to pull in the RSS feed here so it would be easy to follow, and talk about.

Adam Drake
Drake Software