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Realistically? No, not at all. The reason there are no toolchains for BASIC is because nobody uses BASIC (because it's not functional in our modern world), not

Realistically? No, not at all. The reason there are no toolchains for BASIC is because nobody uses BASIC (because it's not functional in our modern world), not the other way round.

vbezhenar 1y ago
Why do you think BASIC is not functional? Our modern world does not differ from the 1980 world at all. Variables are variables, subroutines are subroutines. It fall out of fashion, along with Pascal, Perl, Ruby, but that's just fashion.
- f1shy 1y ago
  I have even seen pretty darn impressive things done with VisualBasic back in the day. And that were not hobby things. I've seen it used in very important mission critical telecommunication equipment. The compiler was custom, not the one from Microsoft. After all, the language had pretty much anything other languages had. How can a language be "inefficient"? You can say it lacked on expressiveness. Maybe was too verbose? But I would not place BASIC into the "verbose" category.
- biofox 1y ago
  I hate that languages have become fads. The concepts have not changed, but there is a constant churn of languages. I don't have to relearn natural language every 5-10 years, but for some reason I'm expected to when it comes to programming.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > Why do you think BASIC is not functional? Because BASIC simply doesn't have first-class functions, and they would be quite hard to represent in a BASIC-like syntax while keeping the language idiomatic. Even the unreasonably clunky C pattern of having a pointer to a function taking void* as its first argument (to account for closure captures) gets you a whole lot closer to functional programming than even the fanciest BASICs.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    Here, "functional" is being used to mean "ablity to function", not "relating to the functional programming paradigm".
pjmlp 1y ago
Except there are, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/ https://www.xojo.com/ https://www.xojo.com/ https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic-pic https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic-pic Just the three that come to my mind, of BASIC toolchains that people actually pay real money to use.

Realistically? No, not at all. The reason there are no toolchains for BASIC is because nobody uses BASIC (because it's not functional in our modern world), not the other way round.

vbezhenar 1y ago

Why do you think BASIC is not functional? Our modern world does not differ from the 1980 world at all. Variables are variables, subroutines are subroutines. It fall out of fashion, along with Pascal, Perl, Ruby, but that's just fashion.

f1shy 1y ago
I have even seen pretty darn impressive things done with VisualBasic back in the day. And that were not hobby things. I've seen it used in very important mission critical telecommunication equipment. The compiler was custom, not the one from Microsoft. After all, the language had pretty much anything other languages had. How can a language be "inefficient"? You can say it lacked on expressiveness. Maybe was too verbose? But I would not place BASIC into the "verbose" category.
biofox 1y ago
I hate that languages have become fads. The concepts have not changed, but there is a constant churn of languages. I don't have to relearn natural language every 5-10 years, but for some reason I'm expected to when it comes to programming.
zozbot234 1y ago
> Why do you think BASIC is not functional? Because BASIC simply doesn't have first-class functions, and they would be quite hard to represent in a BASIC-like syntax while keeping the language idiomatic. Even the unreasonably clunky C pattern of having a pointer to a function taking void* as its first argument (to account for closure captures) gets you a whole lot closer to functional programming than even the fanciest BASICs.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  Here, "functional" is being used to mean "ablity to function", not "relating to the functional programming paradigm".

pjmlp 1y ago

Except there are, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/ https://www.xojo.com/ https://www.xojo.com/ https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic-pic https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic-pic Just the three that come to my mind, of BASIC toolchains that people actually pay real money to use.