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> Was much commercial software written in BASIC? No, very little. There was a huge amount of commercial software written in BASIC dialects such as classic Visu
by skissane 3y ago
> Was much commercial software written in BASIC? No, very little.
There was a huge amount of commercial software written in BASIC dialects such as classic Visual Basic and ASP, Pick/BASIC, HP Business Basic, Wang 2200 Basic, DEC BASIC-PLUS, etc. Boring business software you would likely have never heard of but which was (and in some cases still is) essential to running all kinds of different businesses.
I used to work for a university and both the student administration system and the accounting system were off-the-shelf software, mostly written in VB6 and classic ASP (I believe the vendor also had some COM components written in C++, they had their own app framework, but the business logic was all VB6). At the time, we were waiting for the vendor to finish porting it to VB.NET. 20 years later, it probably still is in VB.NET.
- Locutus_ 3y agoI was surprised to get an email today notifying me of the X86 release of the DEC BASIC PLUS compiler...
- ajross 3y agoFWIW those are all third generation "structured BASIC" languages, not what I understand the upthread commenter to be asking about. Obviously you can evolve the syntax into a more popular language, and Microsoft did to great effect. But that's not the BASIC that was "taught in school in the 80's".
- skissane 3y ago> FWIW those are all third generation "structured BASIC" languages, not what I understand the upthread commenter to be asking about. They weren't. Many minicomputer BASICs of the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Wang's, lacked those structured programming features you are talking about, at least originally. They were classic GOTO/GOSUB line number spaghetti code. And huge amounts of business software was written in them. Some of those apps still run today, because the languages have been ported to Windows/Linux/etc. And eventually, just like Microsoft did, they added a lot of those structured programming features. But sometimes you'll find pre-structured spaghetti-style code surviving long after the dialect gained the ability to do better.
- dole 3y agoSuffered from a few very large non-starts in attempting to port it all to browser-agnostic JS and other frameworks by offshored teams. Couldn't capture the same UX and layouts; too much proprietary business logic in the background that less and less people have knowledge of. Unconvincing demos, bad sales, sunk cost. Good guess.