Reply to post: Its a handy scripting language

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

martinusher Silver badge

Its a handy scripting language

Most of the bad stuff that happens with a particular language is due to it being pushed beyond where the language was intended to go. BASIC has its place, you can do quite a lot of stuff with it and the Visual flavor when it came out (originally not a MS product) was a great idea, its a bit like adding a widget set to a scripting language like TCL. You could quickly stir up adequate applications, you didn't need to fiddle with the code to get the API right, you just wrote (and the fact it had very un-BASIC like things like variable scoping was a bonus).

The trouble comes, as it does to nearly all programming languages, when people add more and more stuff to it. Eventually te language becomes and exercise in programming elegance rather than a tool for expressing problem solutions. I put it down to something that I've noticed over decades of work -- our version of "idle hands' make the Devil's work" is that you just can't stop programmers making tools (its often easier and certainly a lot more fun than doing the mundane stuff that pays the bills).

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