Well over the last few years I have written mainly web applications via PHP and Perl. When I needed to write GUI local apps I would use (ugh) VB 6. I stated learning .NET but I hated it.
Recently I have played with Liberty Basic, iBasic and PureBasic. I love the simplicity behind PureBasic. I don't like all the extra work that I would run into with Liberty and iBasic making API calls.
I just purchased PureBasic back last week. I am already making simple little apps that would have taken me ten times as long with the other mentioned languages.
From what I see PureBasic is just as, if not more powerful than the other Basic-like languages out there. But yet it has the ability to be very simple and quick to learn. If I want to message with lower ASM and API stuff I can, but if I just want to make a quick and dirty GUI I can do that as well.
I guess my reason for positing this is to A) express my happiness with purchasing PureBasic (and the third party PureVisionXP app). I think it is the best money I have spent in a long time. And B) to give a quick comparison with other languages out there...
Recently when I decided to move away from Visual Basic to another Basic environment I did what most people would do and did a search for "best basic compiler" on Google. I came across basic.mindteq.com/ which I found a number of Basic languages reviewed. PureBasic rated the highest of all the listed compilers.
Previously I had used Liberty Basic. Though I think Carl has a nice program for the money, I hated all the long winded API calls. Carl really doesn't like adding new commands. Which I think is the crux of his compiler.
iBasic while power, still isn't nearly as simple and easy to use as PureBasic. As mentioned elsewhere you can develop similar applications with PureBasic with a lot less code than you would need with iBasic.
I would love to see the community keep on growing. I think that from what I can see PureBasic has the best and one of the largest Basic communities out there.
In closing for those of you that are going back and forth between spending your good money on Liberty Basic, iBasic or PureBasic, I want to say that I don't think you could go wrong by going with PureBasic.
I have found a lot of good documentation on the fourms for PureBasic. I would love to see that PDF expanded on with maybe more samples. There are a great number of other resoures like http://www.xs4all.nl/~bluez/datatalk/purebasic.htm and http://www.reelmediaproductions.com/pb/ ... guide.html.
I think that clear consise documentation is the key to winning over people from Liberty and iBasic communities. When they can clearly see how simple and powerful PureBasic is, and have very defined documentation I assure you that they will come over in droves. One of the best things I noticed with Liberty and iBasic was that they both have very detailed and through documentation. While of course one of the reasons that they have so much more documentation is because they require more work to do the same thing that PureBasic looks to be able to do in much less.
So as a complete newbie to the PureBasic community I would like to say Thanks for such a great product. My only request would be to continue to work hard all you PureBasic experts to document, document and document.
And in addition to using things