3 ms·

Normally I avoid these language war threads, but I just thought I'd mention that I have customers who use this 47 year old language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wi

by edw519 16y ago

Normally I avoid these language war threads, but I just thought I'd mention that I have customers who use this 47 year old language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC and absolutely eat their competitors' lunch with it. It's not how big your tool is, but how you use it.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
What do they use it for?
- edw519 16y ago
  Business systems: inventory, sales orders, purchasing, forecasting, accounting, etc. One is one of the largest master distributors of industrial supplies in the world. Another is a web-based and catalog distributor of consumer goods (mostly apparel.) Each has acquired 5 competitors in the past 10 years, converting all of them from whatever they were running to their 20+ year old software written in 40+ year old technology. Both were super agile long before any of us ever used the term. (All client side web software is written in javascript. Some things do change.)
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    I assume that since it's mostly industrial, they don't have a thousand hits a day, etc., form random web gawkers looking to buy a doodle for their home?
    - jeromec 16y ago
      I don't think his point is about what's subjectively the best language to build websites, but rather that language is not the focus of how to make a highly successful business.
  - tianyicui 16y ago
    Which kind of Basic? Visual Basic .NET?
    - drm237 16y ago
      That would not be a "47 year old language".
    - edw519 16y ago
      There may be concurrent instances of "super agile" and "Microsoft", but I have never witnessed one. The two companies I cited use InfoBASIC, each on a different variant of the old Pick operating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system
      - jacques_chester 16y ago
        In fairness, Pick would be a lot of the secret sauce here.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
route66 16y ago
Some years ago I was coding for a inventory/financial administration completely built in OpenBasic (remember to leave space between your line numbers!), gosubs instead of functions and the like. The problem is, that this was one of the most solid systems of this kind I worked on (think "hot code swapping" and "constraint driven development"), but mentioning it on a CV does not exactly evoke the same vibes as using node.js on couchdb. EXIT

by edw519 16y ago

pavel_lishin 16y ago

What do they use it for?

edw519 16y ago
Business systems: inventory, sales orders, purchasing, forecasting, accounting, etc. One is one of the largest master distributors of industrial supplies in the world. Another is a web-based and catalog distributor of consumer goods (mostly apparel.) Each has acquired 5 competitors in the past 10 years, converting all of them from whatever they were running to their 20+ year old software written in 40+ year old technology. Both were super agile long before any of us ever used the term. (All client side web software is written in javascript. Some things do change.)
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  I assume that since it's mostly industrial, they don't have a thousand hits a day, etc., form random web gawkers looking to buy a doodle for their home?
  - jeromec 16y ago
    I don't think his point is about what's subjectively the best language to build websites, but rather that language is not the focus of how to make a highly successful business.
- tianyicui 16y ago
  Which kind of Basic? Visual Basic .NET?
  - drm237 16y ago
    That would not be a "47 year old language".
  - edw519 16y ago
    There may be concurrent instances of "super agile" and "Microsoft", but I have never witnessed one. The two companies I cited use InfoBASIC, each on a different variant of the old Pick operating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system
    - jacques_chester 16y ago
      In fairness, Pick would be a lot of the secret sauce here.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

route66 16y ago

Some years ago I was coding for a inventory/financial administration completely built in OpenBasic (remember to leave space between your line numbers!), gosubs instead of functions and the like. The problem is, that this was one of the most solid systems of this kind I worked on (think "hot code swapping" and "constraint driven development"), but mentioning it on a CV does not exactly evoke the same vibes as using node.js on couchdb. EXIT