SpiderBasic
spiderbasic.com
spiderbasic.com
I'm obviously the target market for this; I touched PureBasic in 2002 and was super-impressed by its performance in 2D graphics on the MAC. So it touches my nostalgia to see the simplicity of its command set in producing multi-window GUI apps in the browser.
It's so interesting to see fellows on here that have no idea what they are looking at, or why it's cool. It's a very niche market I think, and this is what makes it a pity. Back in the day we had BASIC on power up on 8-bit home computers, that's what many of us greybeards learned to code on when we were 10 years old. (And a source of shame in the mid-90's - basic programmers were lamers, ASM coders were cool)... It's nice that you young folk never had to learn assembly to be elite ;-)
The ceiling? I coded a Neural Networks engine in PureBasic! :D (And much, much, much much more.)
There's really no ceiling to hit.
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications.
They meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When JavaScript left Basic it was but the learner. Now, it is the master.
But JavaScript is only a master of evil. It can't win. WebAssembly shall become more powerful than JavaScript can possibly imagine.
EDIT: looked through the forums and it's been asked about but doesn't appear to be implemented. Bummer.
I see potential here though. There's loads of examples and they're easy to run and inspect. I would glady pay for this if it could build PWAs, this would let the apps run offline on iOS.
Reminds me of TranslationParty. Can we find the equilibrium between JavaScript and BASIC? :)
SpiderBasic was born, I guess, to use that framework on mobile devices - which can use Web based applications, if one does not want to invest the time to go native and can bear with the limitations web security imposes.
I.e., rephrasing: Fred and his team had this product which worked on all main desktop platform, and at some point mobile environment became prominent: they must have thought, either we invent a way to compile to native Android and iOS, main application code and libraries, or we exploit the consolidated way of compiling into web apps. So PureBasic got flanked by SpiderBasic.
Access whilst old is a good technology when used correctly within its capabilities.
As uplifting as it is, its limits make it just as easy to paint yourself into a corner.
In today's era, however, I have not yet found a need to use a proprietary language.
> In today's era
In today's era it's still priceless to have a tool that * compiles to a native machine code executable; * is lean and fast - you can get results quickly and from a light efficient interface; * does pretty much anything (and in case you are missing anything in the native libraries, you can interface with external C libraries)...
And (subjectively) can be a real pleasure to use.
there is a link at the bottom of the purebasic web site to the spiderbasic web site:
mdp2021's comment also indicates that:
I'd definitely recommend Python to newbies over any other language.Less flexibility than Python or JavaScript, but standardized, relatively easy to use, and always there by default.
It's proably more like "there was a time in which computers were shipped with their own programming language, and it was BASIC (interfaced to ROM and machine code)". So, it's "BASIC as the fundamental coding tool your computer should have been shipped with".
I'd really dispute that.
I've never looked at C# but no member of the C or greater curly-braces family is genuinely easy. It's just familiarity.
Python is a mess in places because the C libraries underneath show through.
This ugly mess:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#printf-style...
PHP is an ugly mess from "Hello, world" on up.
(I'm on mobile and can't see the full screen)
First page is incredibly flowery about what it is, to the point I still have no freaking clue what this is. Is it JS? Is it BASIC? Not clear at all.
Then I clicked the menu to see the docs and was surprised to see a “Pricing” tab “Uh, what? A paid language/transpiler? Immediate no”.
I started looking for docs and couldn’t find them, finally found them linked at the bottom of the Support page… Obviously that’s where it’d be…
Lastly the docs are hot garbage. A page of links to single pages without navigation to the rest of the docs. What year is it? Oh and “Getting Started”? Yeah, it talks about their custom IDE, and that’s the final nail in the coffin (that was already pretty sealed up).
> (Website:) SpiderBasic is new web client-side programming language based on established BASIC rules. Its allows development of very complex, windowed based web applications, including mobile app for iOS and Android [...] SpiderBasic is a compiler which generates optimized JavaScript
It is a BASIC based language (and tools - e.g. an IDE, if you wish) that compiles into Javascript.
«windowed based web applications»: since the original PureBasic, the language and tools that compiled to native executables, (also) allowed to build windowed applications (complete original GUIs), SpiderBasic, the product in the same family for the Web, also allows to have windows and desktop-like controls in a webpage (optionally).
> the docs ... a page of links to single pages without navigation to the rest of the docs
??? The online documentation is hypertextual, each page linking to the relevant other pages - as it should be. In real practice, documentation is directly accessible from the IDE (optional but a real asset).
By which they mean Object Pascal, but I suppose expecting a line-number BASIC these days is a bit much.
About OO: the language is not made to do that - it uses a different paradigm -, but in SpiderBasic you could exploit the OO features of JS e.g. using inline JS.
If I go to the examples, I get the chance to see a ton of example programs. But I'm dumped into an IDE that I've never used. One change would be to put a run button as a top menu choice. It would be really helpful if the programs had a comment at the top about what the program will do.
I also looked in the FAQ pages hoping for a "how does this work" "how do I use this" etc. and also just got two questions about "how do I pay for this".
Josh got downvoted pretty hard, (and I guess I'll follow), but he had some spot on comments.
I have just re-read the page, I cannot see a single instance of «marketing speak». What do you mean?
> I'm dumped into an IDE that I've never used
To get started, [F1] for the documentation (also cursor-contextual) and [F5] to "compile and run" will suffice¹. It's a lightweight IDE, a "type in the text editor and run, you can learn features and configure preferences later - easy first, complex if you need" thing.
¹: <menu> > 'Compiler' > 'Compile/Run [F5]' (first row)
¹: <menu> > 'Help' > 'Help... [F1]' (first row)
> if the programs had a comment at the top about what the program will do
The purpose is just "minimal code for a simple demonstration of the area in the filename": "2DDrawing.sb", "Accelerometer.sb", "Array.sb", "CanvasGadget.sb", "Cypher.sb"... A few dozen example files to cover the the language and libraries. The documentation also contains code snippets (as in "this is a common context for this command"), but the example files are full small programs.
> "how does this work" "how do I use this"
The documentation in the website is at https://www.spiderbasic.com/documentation/ - it is linked in the first paragraph and it is in the "Support" section of the top menu. Otherwise, with the software installed, the documentation is offline ([F1] opens it).