[Georg]

I've a question to all the QuickBasic-programmers here. Why are you still programming in QuickBasic? What's the fun at the QuickBasic? We used to program in QuickBasic but got crazy from
- difficulties with memory,
- low speed,
- incompatibility with other OS's
and other things. This is a honest question, I just don't understand.
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[Ninkazu]

Good job setting up a flame war, because that may be the possible outcome of this.

Ok, I'll explain for my 30th time.
1. QBasic has absolutely no memory to work with, so optimization is very necessary so we can improve our l33t programming skills.
2. Qbasic is easy to program in, you don't need ten lines of code to print a string to the screen.
3. Old school owns. Respect.

[entivore]

Quickbasic is very appealing. It's small, informs you of possible mistakes as you make them, has a good help system, and lets you make .exe files. It's the language I started up in as a child. Actually, I think I tried pascal first, but it was too hard to get started with from 0 programming experience.

I personally don't use quickbasic for anything I distribute anymore, as I've mastered C++ which is much better for large complex programs, but it's still useful for super quick stuff. It's a lot easier to pop in an ole def seg = &HA000 screen 12 and then start doing circle and gravity experiments for instance. There are less of those little rules to bother me when I'm trying to test out concepts.

Of course I can't answer for everyone else, but that's how it is for me. All my stuff is in c++.
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[Bjorn]

I think this is a very interesting subject, let's try not to make it a flamewar.

Some history

(Might not really be relevant, but will explain my feelings towards QB.)

I noticed Georg already said "WE used to program in QuickBasic", with which he's probably also meaning me and other classmates. I have been using QuickBasic for like 6 years, had used GWBasic a short time before that and I started with MSX Basic for about 2 years. During programming I tended to learn more and more about the language making me never finish a project but always start again on new stuff with new knowledge.

My last project in QB was a joint project with Georg and another classmate. It was an RPG engine for a game we had in mind, called Anestor. At this time, we got the idea that we were really limited by the capabilities of QB. Note that we were not using any libs, except for a small mouse lib, and we didn't do any assembler stuff.

We were looking for something different, something that would offer more posibilities but still be relatively simple. Weird that I can't remember how, but suddenly we kind of discovered the Allegro library, which had reached WIP 3.9.32 at the time. It seemed to offer ALL that QB had to give (in terms of graphically putting stuff on the screen) with just as easy to use functions and much more. Learning C while at the same time learning Allegro was great fun, as all the boring text examples from the C course could be replaced with cool graphical stuff.

Conclusion

After learning C and Allegro we didn't even discuss doing anything with QB anymore. Looking back at it, man would it be nice if I had learned about Allegro earlier. I agree with entivore in that QB is very accesible with it's nice help system and mostly exactly pointing out where a mistake has been made. But today's C compilers do a good job at that too and Allegro has the really nice documentation.

Ninkazu:

1. Optimization often means using more memory. And no matter how much memory optimizing you do, there won't fit many bitmaps in < 600 kb of conventional memory.
2. Whoever writes a program that writes a string to the screen? I know of one program, the "Hello world" thingy.
3. Yeah, Old School can be fun. :-)

No flames intended. :-P

[Tenshi]

My reason:
- Because I started this project as a QB RPG and I want it to be ranked as a QB RPG upon completion. SURE I could easily switch to DirectX and C++... and get more memory and all kinds of l33t sh!t to work with, but I also think about it this way:
Start with something.... see if it's liked, even simple, and then produce something better, more powerful! Which is my next project, a 32-bit Object Oriented Scripting Engine. Essentially, almost Java for gaming, but customized to my engines.

- And nearly all of us are fluent in many languages, so it doesn't really matter. =) I myself have a long list of languages I can write in.
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[Georg]

If my question is able to start a flame war, then it's probably a good question. I guess we're old and wise enough to avoid a flame war.

To Ninkazu:

1. In other languages like C you can also practise your l33t programming skills with better result. The only difference may be that you're forced to in QuickBasic.
2. When you want to write something to the screen you often want it with your one specific demands, so you'll have to write a function for that anyway. After writing that function (or including one) it will only take one line of code each time you write text to the screen.
3. If you mean like nostalgia then I agree. But maybe it's time to move on.

To entivore:
I agree with Bjørn.

To Tenshi:
You say it doesn't really matter, but I have to disagree. One language has a lot more possibilities than another. But I understand you want to finish a project before starting a new one, otherwise one might never finish a project. (Like we used to do.)
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[Nodtveidt]

*censored*

-nek

[Georg]

Please, let's avoid making a flame war out of this and try to have a serious discussion. No one is forced to participate and if you don't want to talk about this subject please don't.
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[Mandrake]

Nek, I'm going to ask you very nicely to edit that post so we can keep this thread going. No one is bitching about x lang being better/worse. People are having a very good debate. Please don't make me lock this thread, it's a good read.

[Tenshi]

[Bjorn]

Yeah, that's one of those nice feature of QB which took my much too long to discover. During the years I was learning QB I did several discoveries that really opened my mind. The first must have been FOR loops, wow did THAT save a lot of code! Next was arrays. Again, loads of lines could be written shorter. Then the SUBs, which really worked much better for structuring code than the GOSUB-RETURNs. I really liked how QB would hide the rest of the program when looking at a SUB.

But about 2. Ninkazu pointed out that it didn't take ten lines of code to do something as simple as putting a string to the screen. I'm sure he wasn't referring to the possibity of defining a function as that's something almost any programming language would allow. I think he was referring to this:

[Rainer Deyke]

I suspect that the main reason for choosing QBasic is familiarity with it and unfamiliarity with the alternatives. For example, Python, like QBasic, let's you print text on the screen with a one-liner program. Unlike QBasic, it runs natively on Windows (which means no memory limitation, access to high resolution display modes, and sound that doesn't rely on flaky DOS emulation drivers). Unlike all the BASIC variants, Python is a highly flexible, clean, and powerful (if a bit slow) language.

[Barok]

I started QB as an introductory for harder languages. in time, i will change to harder languages. but i like QB because it is easy, don't need dozens of text to say "HI!", and it's amazing what you can do with it, even though it's not as powerful as other languages.
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[Ninkazu]

Bjorn, you forgot

[Tenshi]

- Actually, you wouldn't say