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Re: DirectX
« Reply #13 on: Dec 19th, 2013, 6:31pm »
I'm not sure if anyone cares anymore since this is an older thread but I know a bit about Creative Basic so I'll tell you what I know.
It's an interpreted Basic originally written for the Amiga as Ibasic by Paul Turley. Paul was an excellent programmer and he did a good job with it. He later ported it to Windows. Then he wrote a compiled version and all but forgot about the interpreted version. It got a little more development but not much.
He sold them to someone else and wrote what were nearly exact copies of them called Creative Basic for the interpreted version and Ebasic for the compiled version. Then he sold those to someone else and wrote a nearly exact copy ... it gets kind of confusing.
Anyway Paul is in prison for the next 30 years as of a few months ago and other programmers are still supporting and selling his products. They're very good products but I'll be surprised if they have much future. Creative Basic gets almost no attention from them.
Paul was a really excellent programmer. He wrote good, solid, tight code, made it work well and he did it quickly. If he'd been a better man he'd have been a phenom.
Creative Basic is a beautiful little interpreter that has one big advantage: it doesn't try to do much. It's a far less powerful version of Basic and because of that it's a lot simpler and more straightforward. But if you want to do something serious with Basic it's probably not the best choice. It's great for playing around.
It's a far less powerful version of Basic and because of that it's a lot simpler and more straightforward.
You can't get much 'simpler' than BBC BASIC - the BB4W interpreter is smaller than 64 Kbytes and as such will fit in the instruction cache of some modern processors. That contributes to its relatively high speed (for a traditional interpreter).
The challenge is to ensure that the simplicity and small size aren't limiting, by carefully choosing which features to build in and which to offload to libraries. I think BBC BASIC achieves that balance pretty well.
So I believe it is possible to have simplicity and power at the same time. But I appreciate that such comments are unwelcome here.
Re: DirectX
« Reply #15 on: Dec 20th, 2013, 03:33am »
I wasn't saying BBC4W wasn't simple. I don't really know it well enough to know. I bought it a few years ago and have used it a bit now and then, but not for anything very difficult or complex.
Based on the little I know, I'd say BBC4W is by far the more powerful of the two. Once learned, it's probably the simpler as well, although I can only guess at that. But for the new programmer I think it probably has a steeper learning curve.
I'm an old guy now and I don't do much programming anymore. I can't really focus well enough to do anything very complicated. But after a long career as a programmer I still enjoy playing with it from time to time. I installed both Creative Basic and BBC4W about a week ago and I've been playing around with them and having a good time.
Honestly, I wasn't putting your system down at all. I think it's pretty impressive. If this thread had been a recent one I'd probably have suggested BBC4W, not only because Creative doesn't have much future, it's not nearly as useful.
I didn't suggest that because I assumed the issue was probably decided by the original poster long ago.
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