Forum Participation

[John]

AllBASIC Members,

It seems that only AIR and myself are posting to the forum. Is there no interest in a language forum any longer? I'm seriously thinking of retiring this forum due to lack of participation.

[John]

It seems obvious that the interest in this forum by its members has faded. My plan is to put AllBASIC in archive mode like the Retro BASIC forum I host.

This is your last chance to keep this forum active.

[AlyssonR]

Its a shame, but if that is what you need to do ... *shrugs*

For my part programming has had to be relegated to just another tool; coding for its own sake no longer brings me the pleasure it once did. I am no longer active in the IT industry and most of my projects, these days, are based around microcontrollers using some variant of C (which I dislike, but not as much as I detest Java and Python).

What I did for the old Dragon group (retro system) when Yahoo Groups died, was open a free groups.io email discussion group. It is free, available, and, with next to no traffic (a message per month), no problem adminning. I host the few files from the old group on DropBox.

Whilst not a forum, it does allow people to keep in touch when idiocies like Facebook fail, and it does keep the few active threads open for anyone who wants to chime in.

I'm still interested, by the way, in Script Basic - especially the SB64 version, even if I am still using Win7 and Server 2008R2 as my OS of choice.

Now, I'm going to head off to bed so that I can have some nostalgic nightmares about code-bashing on PDP-11 

[John]

Thanks Alysson for your post and the update with what's going on in your world.

I'm active with COM/OLE interfacing as the clients I do work for it's still the standard. I rarely get any interest from SB Windows users looking for a .net connection. My interest in 64 bit is Linux only.

I posted a new ScriptBasic Windows 32 bit install on the ScriptBasic forum. Give it a try. Any feedback would be appreciated.

[AlyssonR]

Thanks John.

ATM, I'm busy planning an environmental monitoring and ventilation system for my server cabinet to sit alongside some power sequencing hardware - if I switch the whole lot on at once, it trips the breakers in my (domestic) main box with the inrush current. I need to be able to bring up whichever combination of servers and ancillaries I need ... and being a lazy toad, I want to be able to do it over the network from my desktop.

This means, of course, microcontrollers (ESP-32 and STM-32). Thankfully, they (and all of the other junk I use) share a common IDE (Arduino HAD to be good for something other than playing about!).

Mains voltage, supply presence and current sensing is SO much fun, too. </sarcasm>

I do wish there were a freebie BASIC compiler that would feed into the Arduino development toolchain. {le sigh} Or even a sane string handling capability in C.

My own software on the servers is run with dedicated remote software on my desktop (serial over IP) since it doesn't need anything too fancy. Images are loaded directly from the server on demand.

I'll go take a look at the latest SB installer.

[John]

ScriptBasic runs great on the Raspberry Pi. Have you checked checked out the RaspberryBASIC.org forum?

[AlyssonR]

I tried SB on a RasPi. I'm saving that for a different project that I have in mind.

The Pi is a little high level for most of my projects, though I will be trying out a Pi Nano at some point soon.
I have a feeling that it might do for a drive emulator for my old PDP (the MFM hard drive died a decade or more past).

The biggest problem is getting around to trying out the various options and development boards.

[John]

Control Solutions and Banner Engineering which are commercial users of SB use the language embedded in their controllers. They run Posix based OSs. SB pretty much works on any OS with a C compiler.

[AlyssonR]

Two commercial users using SB as an embedded scripting language is pretty good. The main reason I'm not using *ix is that I gave all of my tools and files on Windows, and I really don't feel like rewiring my head to use *ix on a regular basis.

I wonder if it would be possible to compile SB (with extra twiddly bits) onto the bare metal of one of the 32-bit microcontrollers, producing a SBC similar to the old 8-bit home computers.  </musing>

Most of what I'm playing with, though, is much lower level. Barely even smart instrumentation; you really don't need an OS for a network enabled power switch, after all. IoT is out, too - more like LANoT. Living in a 400 year old cottage really gives you an appreciation for wired networks. Even if I do need a 2 ft long drill bit to get through the structural walls.

I think my next job, though, will be putting stuff up on my project blog - not that it goes anywhere much these days. It's the old documentation problem again - who wants to write the documentation 

[John]

Many companies still use 32 bit COM/OLE automation. Intuit's desktop API is COM/OLE. Sage 100 BOI is COM/OLE as well. Microsoft recommends using 32 bit Office for connectivity. Once MS drops COM & VB classic runtime support, my Windows days are over.

[AlyssonR]

I realise that COM/OLE is still where MS systems still thrive.

Since I don't plan on departing from Win 7 anytime soon, then VB support is still alive and kicking.

Heck, my DB server is running Server 2k3 (XP codebase) just so that the tape drive backup still works.

... how sad is that?

I still use Word for preference, and a lot of my reference data is on Excel (2003 version as I detest the ribbon on the later versions).

[John]

I was surprised to see Microsoft using the VB Classic IDE as their Rust IDE. VB classic was Microsoft's best language they ever release. It is still alive with enhancements like VBCCR (common controls replacement) to give VB classic a modern UI.

[AlyssonR]

I had no idea about the Rust IDE.

It always sounds to me as though it needs to run on a WD40 system.

[John]

WD-40 is  required include when using the Rust language. 🤣

[Transdiv]

Hi, Don't freezee the Forum