I know exactly what you mean and had the same concerns before I purchased a PB license 6yrs ago.BillyBob wrote:Being new to the "PB platform", I have spent many hours scouring this forum and anything I can find. I realize that the latest release 4.51 was June 2010, however, I can't help but feel like maybe I should not spend too much time learning this system. Most, if not all of the limited information or tutorials that I have found seems to be dated by years. MANY links to information are broken and there seems to be little support or education.
I really want to like, use, and thus support the PB community, but I am concerned that I am coming to the party after last call. What am I missing? My intention is not to bash this at all. On the contrary, I am looking for positive feedback and some reassurance that this is going to be a viable platform going forward.
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PB doesn't hold your hand like the Delphi, VB, RunRev, RealBasic, etc. environments all do. They all have big black boxes (runtimes). But in exchange for that lack of hand-holding you get small, fast, flexible and powerful executables that aren't a minimum of 2MB just to do a "Hello World"! Plus, the debugging facilities are excellent. I actually really like the way the documentation is done, I can find what I want quickly without having to read through paragraph after paragraph to get the details I need.
PB has a dedicated 2-man development team and they focus, rightly IMHO, on adding new functionality to the system and not on tutorials, huge runtimes that do a bunch of black-box work for you, etc. The language itself has been pretty stable for sometime now and they've been focusing on adding/improving the libraries, IDE, language tweaks, etc.
My favorite new feature is Map, love it!
Things like the event loop are handled manually in your code, which is different from the other environments I mentioned above, but personally I like it that way. It's a little bit more work up front but you have much more control over the application without wondering what is going on in the mysterious runtime black box. (can you tell I dislike black boxes???)
Besides, where else can you get such a powerful development system so affordably AND with free lifetime updates across all supported platforms!?!
Good luck and feel free to ask your questions here, the helpful community is very knowledgeable in lots of different areas and growing! I've asked lots of stupid questions here and am still standing.
This is a page to 3rd party links. We don't want the development team wasting their valuable time constantly monitoring a 3rd party links page to see if any of those links are unavailable. If you send an email to them about the bad links, I'm sure they'll then remove them.What prompted my post yesterday was when I was on the PB Official site and on this page in particular http://www.purebasic.com/links.php. Take a minute and click on the links and tell how many pages are not there? I counted 3 before I stopped.
One thing I'll do occasionally is go to the "Members" link here in the forum and look to see how many people have joined in the last month. It's typically 2-3 new people every day. Not too shabby for a language with NO marketing budget whatsoever!
PB really is something special and is alive and well. Go for it!
