On Monday 07 June 2004 07:21 pm, Trent Shipley wrote:
> I take it as evidence of the FOSS community's connection to academia
> instead of busine$$ that implementations of BASIC and COBOL for Linux are
> very limited and partial. I know of no good FOSS BASIC, though there may be
> commercial products for Linux. Of course, a non-MS BASIC might be *very*
> different from VB.
I am going to direct him (and me) to look at the HBasic that Michael pointed
to.
> So ... if you want to convert to Linux, kiss your VB code and skills
> goodbye.
Yes, well, he has no expectation that the transition to Linux will without
learning something new. But, that is part of the point. He is bright and
wants to learn something new.
> That said KDE has a basic sub-project called KBasic, but it sounded very
> new. If your friend can wait two or three years....
> http://www.kbasic.org/
I'd rather move on something current.
> The obvious VB substitutes are:
> TCL/TK
> PERL
> Python
> Guile (a variation on Scheme. This involves not just new skills but the
> cognitive jump from procedural-imperative to functional programming.)
> Delphi (maybe, not free from Borland.)
All these are under consideration. I need to assess how he works now, which I
have not done yet. But, I suspect that he will want to use an IDE to start
with. Plus, the language/compiler I think will have to interface with the
system well. I'll start evaluating with him and pointing at things to
evaluate on his own.
> I expect that the RAD programming environments aren't up to MS standards.
> (How often have I been told "I our shop we program Korn with vi." They
> wince when I say I use PERL and emacs in an effort to avoid both Korn and
> vi.) PERL and the Bash/Korn scripting languages are analogs to a lot of VBS
> for system scripting. Unfortunately there is no universally standard for
> application scripting comparable to VBA, Guile might come closest.
>
>
> I think of the above as 3.5 generation languages. (Less easy and abstract
> than SQL but MUCH easier than Ada or Java.)
>
> At the third level of complexity there are:
> C
> C++
> Objective C (obscure?)
> Java
> Lisp (could be considered obscure, except that it many FOSSers like it so
> much.)
I did not discuss these "lower-level" languages at all. I'll have to see.
> And there are no shortage of obscure languages that have more support that
> BASIC including:
> Ada
> APL
> Eiffel
> Pascal
> Prolog
> Ruby
> Scheme
> Smalltalk
Funny, isn't it. The langauge that many, many of my generation first learned,
BASIC, does not have as much support in Linux. As you mentioned, this
situation probably has to do with Linux's roots in academia and that it is
rooted in C and was created near the end of the BASIC "wave."
Very interesting indeed. Thanks.
Alan
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