PureBasic Forum

The short story: I grew away from it.

The longer story:

PureBasic is actually the language which got me into serious computer programming. Serious as in that I could do really useful/advanced stuff and even make a living.

Before PB the most serious thing I was doing was programming in Game Maker script (before YoYo Games bought it) and trying to make simple games.

What I liked best about PureBasic was the very detailed documentation with useful examples and that it contained an easy to use API to do VERY much. It's really beginner friendly, and I guess that's why I stopped looking for something better (for a while).

But as I grew more interested and experienced in programming and the whole community around it I figured that no serious teams would ever want to work with a programming language where the only compiler available is proprietary and costs money. Hence it didn't seem like a very professional choice for my future.

I also grew very found of the open source community and all the open source code and tools available (without open source code most of the software we depend on today could not exist).

Hence I said to myself that I would not use PureBasic for any of my new projects, I gave myself that challenge! And it was really hard at first... This was also the time when I switched from Windows 7 to using Debian as my main operating system (I really hated Windows 8 ).

Using Linux I eventually started getting comfortable with C++ and could do advanced stuff with it (doesn't mean it's enjoyable though). And I started to notice how much friendlier a Unix based system is to a developer, especially Debian based distros where I can just "apt-get" most of my developer tools/libraries and have it all ready for me. Also most of the developers out there use Unix based systems, hence it is so much easier to compile their code then and to set up the environments needed. I quickly decided that coding in Windows is NOT fun at all in comparison!!

But yeah, I grew tired of C++, it's lack of a package system (that made sense to me) and all the little things you need to know about to avoid certain mistakes etc... It's a powerful language, but it's not really a very FUN language to use. Doing a small project can end up taking much longer time than you planned, especially when you want it to be cross-platform and be easy to set up the development-environment on any system.

So eventually I tried to do a project in Node.js (just to check it out). And wow, suddenly I was back to a kind of PureBasic coding enjoyment again. So for a lot of my new projects I will actually choose Javascript/Typescript (if super high performance is not needed). And if you think Node.js is kinda bloated then please check out Deno at //deno.land (it's not production ready though).

Since most of our computers today are much more powerful than what they need to be programming something in a scripting language is actually not a "wrong" thing to do anymore. But of course, chose the right tool for the job (and the right tool for you).

Right now I am writing a game with the browser as its GUI, using WebGL2 (Pixi.js). A Javascript backend serving the HTML/Javascript part to the browser and communicating with it through binary WebSockets (not JSON, lol). Also the backend will do part of the game-logic and the multiplayer networking part.

Well, that's part of my story (I left out the part about my health problems). I don't know why I shared this, but I felt that it is a fair thing to do, to explain why I left this great PB community.

Anyway, thanks to Fred and the team for making the language which played the biggest part of my journey!

I hope your health is okay now. IIRC, way back in the day you had a collapsed lung happen out of nowhere. Glad to see an old-timer check in.

Truly miss the old gang and no matter what, the feel of the community just isn't the same.

Hello Joakim Christiansen,

I love to hear the thru story of someone.
its about live he.
i'm programming for more than 40 years now,
and we all, have almost the same road about looking for the best program environments
to create (realize) are dreams in programming.

thanks,

marc

Wow, you remembered that! Impressive!
Yeah, my lungs have been okay But I still get pains in my muscles keeping me from doing any serious programming sadly (just a few hours every now and then). I think it might be fibromyalgia.

marc_256, agreed

Hi Joakim,

I do understand why you've gravitated to open source, I've done the same for the most part although I still prefer SpiderBasic to anything else I've found for the browser.

I experimented with nodejs but I found so much relies on passing callbacks it got on my nellies a bit.

For the project I'm currently working on I'm using PyPy and coding in Python really has been a pleasure. Having said that the project is a JSON-RPC server that (as well as dealing with clients) has to perform various tasks on different schedules so I have used PureBasic to create a simple client that gets triggered by Windows task scheduler and sends a JSON request to the PyPy server so PureBasic was still useful for me.

Sorry to hear about your health issues. My father recently died of alzheimers and I've been contemplating a serious change of lifestyle (i.e. less meat, chocolate and Thatchers Haze) to reduce my risk of following the same path. I recently watched a Larry King interview with Dean Ornish M.D. and I found him a very interesting person. He believes many chronic diseases are different manifestations of the same underlying cause and for many a change of lifestyle can have a powerful impact. I just mention this in case it may be of interest to you: https://undoitbook.com/. That's not a hard sell, I'm not on a commission

All the best..
Weave

Hi Joakim,

I’ve been on a similar journey myself. I hope you have great success with TypeScript and JavaScript.

I’ve come back to PB now. The big problem I have with JavaScript are the dependencies. They’re insane.

Look at this list of 16 frameworks: https://www.google.com/amp/s/hub.packtp ... -2019/amp/

Hardly any of these were around 10 years ago. Hardly any will be around in 10 years. When I started with JavaScript it was all about Dojo, QueryJS and YUI. They’re not in the list.

While I’ve been away from PB a whole generation of web technology stacks have risen and fallen.

Yet Purebasic has remained the same. It’s like a Tuxedo that remains smart regardless of the other fashions.

If you find yourself spending you days dealing with dependency hell instead of delivering stuff that works, like I did, remember that there is a better way.

Personally It cause me to lose the joy of programming and move into Architecture.

Hopefully that doesn’t happen and you are able to follow the same philosophy of effective simplicity in the Javascript realm.

Good luck.



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Purebasic surely is not that "professional", and it is an advantage as for me.
I really hated to do something in C++, C#, Java, Rust-Go, whatever of other actual languages, there are so many useless actions performed when coding on them, that coding slows down a lot and becomes never-ending beurocracy.
What is a sense to do something on them, If I can do the same with the equal or better quality on PB, spending a lot lesser time and efforts, and having a resulting code much cleaner and shorter?
Well I'm mostly saying what was said a lot of times here (including what was in some my older posts^^)

Also I don't like to work in team, it brings a lot more of that beurocracy.
It is an illusion of making "something great" if you work in a large team, your part of work is very limited and heavily controlled by others and all those team standarts, etc. What a point is to code some poor subsystem of a large project? Any codemonkey can do that, the development processes in "serious teams" are designed this way -- every coder must be easily replaceable and every coder does some separated part of project, often even don't knowing what are doing others.
Maybe all that brings some good money, but that's damn annoying and kills all of the coding fun, I though many times about all that (as I needed money too to live somehow), but it still doesn't looks good. I'd like more to get a luck in something independent.

And anyway I don't see any reasons to drop Purebasic completely.
Even if using other and more "professional" language, PB still remains very cool itself and is more useful than any other in a lot of cases.

What about proprietary compiler I don't see any problem in this. What's the difference, is it open-source or closed? All that matters is quality. Modern Purebasic compiler doesn't have a lot of bugs, there is nothing making it unusable for a nearest future. It even looks more stable and reliable than lot of opensource frameworks which were so popular previously (and died in less than 2 years after became actual, because much more new were created to replace them).

PS. I hope Purebasic is still useful for it's creators, this language is unique a lot and there are no many others close to it in it's advantages.
Maybe Fred should change licensing somehow, modernize forum, site, add some PR, etc, to have more incomes and abilities to develop it further (for example, moving to a smartphones, which is even more actual in 2019 and may grant a long life for PB).

Good read. PureBasic was created to help jumping into programming, so it reached its goal . It's a logical move you want to switch to something else to make a living from it, and even if PureBasic evolded a lot since the beginning to be able to complete very complex task, it still is a beginner friendly language at his heart ! Good luck for your future projects

And also purebasic, it is a programming language for "finalists". i.e. for those who have passed a way from programming in machine codes to modern toolkits and represents details, but to keep in a head all it is already lazy, and for what, if there is a fred and community.

PureBasic was my first programming language (2004), but although I later use C#, I find both programming languages very good.
And if a function does not exist in PureBasic, then it is also no problem to develop a function in PureBasic or in C# for PureBasic. There are no limits.

I must interject on Fred's humility.
Yes, PureBasic started out small and targeted "beginners".
But, around v4+ it became a true RAD tool for me.
I am drooling over what v6 might offer(LLVM,ARM targets,RaspberryPI), but I still crank along nicely with all incarnations to date.
The nitpicky bugs that exist now have workarounds and the optimized code falls short of true C.
Still, the prototype aspects of PureBasic outweigh departure.
Looking forward to next versions

Just give us LLVM - can you imagine the possibilities?


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Can you explain how to use .NET dll components in pb if compiled as follows.?

If your answer is negative, whether this is not a limitation?

You must create your own .NET wrapper DLL to use the DLL file in PB to access .NET methods.
It is important that your DLL functions are unmanaged code. (managed code (.NET) unmanaged code)
With the wrapper DLL it is possible to use all .NET assemblies. That's what I meant by "no limits".

Hello all,

I use PB to create solutions to the enterprise. Mostly those are a service applications running in a server room and processing big amount of data (gigabytes)
in the business intelligence, system integration and data analysis field. PB's ultimate power make this possible, execution speed is near C and
development time is much more shorter, things are simpler, easy to maintain, better code, clean syntax and finally less bugs compared to other tools/languages.
Cross platform support is necessary because both Linux and Windows servers are used by customers.

I like to focus to the solution, not play with the programming tools and make things more complicate than needed.
I have used countless programming languages since late 1980's from assembler to high level application builders, somehow PB is often a winner when choosing a language to use in a project.
It's amazing that beginners can start programming very quickly with PB and same time it's not limited to beginners, it's a power tool for experienced programmers!
Also PB's power mean that energy consumption in the running application is very low if a programmer has ability to write good code (compared to scripting languages and
bytecode compiled languages), PB is a green solution to help to save this planet! Not a bad point to use in the marketing nowadays.

Because of the name (PureBasic) some people (too many) categorize PB as a toy language which should not be used in any professional programming task,
they even not look what is under the hood before get an opinion of PB. Funny that same time professional programming tools/languages whose syntax is very "basic"-like
for example PowerBuilder, WinDev, Progress/OpenEdge etc.. are used to run big business and business critical tasks. Nobody point that they use Basic-style language.
Of course there is situations where most languages including PB are not enough, and need coroutines, message passing, lot of scientific libraries etc..
Then Erlang, Julia or some special tool could be a better choice.

Currently PB is very good, but some essential features still missing to use it in every project. Those are lacking SSL/TLS support in the network library
and database connections. Server side SSL/TLS would be a super feature - imagine finally could create an independent application server, cloud platform services,
anything server stuff which meets the requirements of IT policy in the enteprise market!
No need dozens of libraries, container solutions (Docker etc..), external licenses, Stunnel or any mess, just develop, run and enjoy!

Years after years Raspberry Pi come more to the enteprise, although it is more known as a hobbyist HW platform. I mean IoT field in the enterprise. Inexpensive price is one thing
which make this possible. Sad that PB does not offer ARM processor support. Imagine Raspberry Pi 4 IoT solution powered by PB application - lot of possibilities for any startup
company if compare to Python solutions. Speed and protected code! For most IoT solutions TCP/UDP sockets are enough to connect to the cloud especially
if a PB based server application is used, but if needed, MQTT library is relatively easy to write in PB or create a wrapper, sometimes REST is enough.

I have noticed that PB's development is not fast now, some features and bug fixes coming regularly which is good and keep it alive, but not enough to stay in business.
I understood that money is the key reason for the current situation. But I'm sure that here is many users who are willing to pay extra to speed up the PB's development.
Personally I can support PB's development for example 500 euros (or more) every year. I save more than that in time in one month when using PB,
so it is a good deal if get needed features that way. Also some way to get priority bug fixes would be good, I can't tell to customer that the bug fix for the problem
may come in next year or some year. If I do that, I have to say bye bye to customer. I have to fix the problem in days or weeks.
Also some information of PB's future plan and goals helps the user community to know which direction PB is planned to develop in the near future.
I don't mean strict schedules, but something more than we can know now.

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