Post by Microchip on Jan 14, 2008 16:23:02 GMT -5
I'm sure the following is not going to sit well with the Run BASIC faithful but it is "My own first impressions" after toying with Run BASIC for a week. I know I have just started to scratch the surface. I started by trying to adapt a program that I have used for learning various incarnations of BASIC over the past 30 years ( and no I won’t tell you what the program is or does).
Frankly I find that Run BASIC fails to deliver and I would recommend to my friends to "wait and see" what version 2 brings because version 1 doesn’t appear to be ready. I was immediately hit by the half implemented PRINT statement with it's lack of support for the comma ',' and TAB. Try manually spacing everything out and you discover that extra spaces are ignored, even in the middle of a line, making it impossible to do the simplest of formatting. Looking for help? Don't bother trying to read the manual, there isn't one. Care to look in the "Help" file, good luck. The "Open help file" link produces the error "The page cannot be displayed". You can get into the Help file if you follow the link off the Help tab on the screen but then you find only a few of the commands/statements are explained in any detail. I find the web based editing of source code is brutal. I have finally gotten into the habit of indenting my code to help make things a little more readable but since you can’t use the tab key in a web browse to do this it quickly becomes tiresome to manually space each and every line out. Saving and editing it with Notepad or WordPad reveals the online editor adds an extra linefeed to every line making everything double spaced, which in turn makes the source code look like a mess. I have also quickly discovered you can’t really do much of anything without knowing how to program in raw HTML. I thought RUN Basic was supposed to insulate us from that sort of stuff by providing simple BASIC commands to use.
I'm not done "playing" with it yet but I am quickly losing my enthusiasm for Run BASIC. For now, it looks like my old program may have found a BASIC which it can’t be converted to (other than Visual Basic which everyone knows doesn’t have anything to do with BASIC).
Bottom line, my first impression boils down to: If you want to build a web application by only using BASIC then Run BASIC doesn't cut it since it forces you to work outside of BASIC to accomplish your task. I hope that after I pound my head against my keyboard for a few hundred more hours that my opinion changes but right now I am left feeling very frustrated.
Or, do I just not get the concept?
--Microchip
Frankly I find that Run BASIC fails to deliver and I would recommend to my friends to "wait and see" what version 2 brings because version 1 doesn’t appear to be ready. I was immediately hit by the half implemented PRINT statement with it's lack of support for the comma ',' and TAB. Try manually spacing everything out and you discover that extra spaces are ignored, even in the middle of a line, making it impossible to do the simplest of formatting. Looking for help? Don't bother trying to read the manual, there isn't one. Care to look in the "Help" file, good luck. The "Open help file" link produces the error "The page cannot be displayed". You can get into the Help file if you follow the link off the Help tab on the screen but then you find only a few of the commands/statements are explained in any detail. I find the web based editing of source code is brutal. I have finally gotten into the habit of indenting my code to help make things a little more readable but since you can’t use the tab key in a web browse to do this it quickly becomes tiresome to manually space each and every line out. Saving and editing it with Notepad or WordPad reveals the online editor adds an extra linefeed to every line making everything double spaced, which in turn makes the source code look like a mess. I have also quickly discovered you can’t really do much of anything without knowing how to program in raw HTML. I thought RUN Basic was supposed to insulate us from that sort of stuff by providing simple BASIC commands to use.
I'm not done "playing" with it yet but I am quickly losing my enthusiasm for Run BASIC. For now, it looks like my old program may have found a BASIC which it can’t be converted to (other than Visual Basic which everyone knows doesn’t have anything to do with BASIC).
Bottom line, my first impression boils down to: If you want to build a web application by only using BASIC then Run BASIC doesn't cut it since it forces you to work outside of BASIC to accomplish your task. I hope that after I pound my head against my keyboard for a few hundred more hours that my opinion changes but right now I am left feeling very frustrated.
Or, do I just not get the concept?
--Microchip