PowerBasic - will it recover or is the Air out?

[Theo Gottwald]

As we have learned, Bob Zale, the "Man behind PowerBasic", left us short time ago.

Then last days, i have heared that Jose wants to use less time in front of the computer.
In his situation a very good decision.

Looking at the forum there is not much movement here these days.
It looks a bit like "the air is out", at least for the moment.

Will we get things running again next year?

Fact is that the PB that we have is good as it is. There may always be wishes especially about X64, but PB is here and it is good.
And the work that Jose has already done is so much that i am sure, most people (including me) have no overview whats all there - already now.

Many of us can use Month and years just to use all the wrappers and stuff that IS NOW HERE.
Thats just the fact.

So i believe we will start into the new year a bit more slowly about Powerbasic.
And i wish Jose a good recovery from a hard year 2012.

A year full of movements goes to its end. Was it a good year for PB?
I'd say for PB it was the worst year in history.

But anything that looks so bad on first look, has a hidden good side also.
Let's hope that next year we will get strenght to explore the new chances the changes this year make possible.

Lets hope on new direction, new ideas, new decisions.

Lets hope that PB will recover and will be stronger then ever.

And especially that my and our all friend Jose will be healthy and motivated to stay more years with us and with a lot new ideas,
anytime next year!

PS: The year has not yet ended, and even the famouse 21.12.12 is not yet over.
Mayans predicted the coming of "Bolon Yokte" who shall introduce a new age.
Muslims call him "the Mahdi" and Jews and Christians expect "Jesus" to arrive.

So what is going to happen at the 21.12.12 ?

I'll personally light a candle at the 20th and hope that it still burns on the 25th.
And then we'll carefully watch if things happen that are expected to happen first
(for example if Ariel Sharon's death - he's possibly still in the coma).
and see what happens.

This year was already not an easy year and it has not yet ended!
Lets pray that 2012 will have a good end.

And may god bless us with peace in 2012 and also in the new year 2013 that shall come and starts as the first year of the new age.

[Frederick J. Harris]

Yes, I feel terrible about Bob's passing, as I said before Theo.  But we do have the benifit of his tremendous work, and that is PB Win 10, and CC6.  And we are all so much further ahead due to Jose's tireless work.  I really think that if it hadn't been for Jose, at this point we would all be just at the point of figuring out how to use Active X controls, instead of having had the ability to use them since he figurred out how to do it back in Windows 7 times about 2003 or so.  For these reasons I think there is a lot to be grateful for, even though some pretty terrible things have happened.

For my own personal situation, I could get by with PB Win 7 if I had to.  Just think of all the major improvements since then.  In PB Win 8 Bob was finally able to convert his asm codebase from 16 bit to 32 bit.  In PB Win 9 we got classes and direct VTable access.  In PB Win 10 we got static libraries and unbelievably good unicode support which makes the C++ way of doing things look silly.

In the larger picture Microsoft's infatuation with Apple's phone business and tablets has definitely taken the spotlight off desktop apps, which is I think where most of us 'live'.  So I don't think there will be all that much inovation there to do.  Win32 will just keep on going doing all the unglamorous grunt work of the computer field for business and goverment.   In terms of x64, I think the steam has been decreased there too for the reason I just mentioned; Microsoft wants to cut into Apple's phone business, and x64 doesn't really matter there much in that context. 

So I guess its good to try to look on the bright side.  It certainly doesn't help to dwell on the dark side.  I really doubt any programming community is more into helping one another than the PowerBASIC community, and by that I mean the folks at www.powerbasic.com, plus all the related sites such as here and elsewhere. 

[Frederick J. Harris]

But the bad has really been bad.  That is for sure.  I really feel everybody else's pain too.  Take Dominic, for example.  He's been working on his new release for years, and many of us are anxious to get it.  And just about exactly when its about ready - this terrible thing happened. 

I expect everyone who creates 3rd party tools for PowerBASIC feels likewise diminished. 

Its been a terrible year for me for other reasons.  Because of the things going on in the broader technology realm involving Microsoft and tablets, many, many years of my C++ work with data collectors and Windows CE was put in jeopardy.  I spent a good part of this year not programming but fighting my bureaucracy here at work over that issue.  Finally things got so bad for me mentally I had to distance myself from it and head out into the wilderness for a month to get away from it.  In my darker moments I felt like I was wasting my life writing code, which seems to be of such an expendable and ephemeral nature.  One of my greatest successes here at work has been the PowerBASIC programming I have done.  It has helped my organization a great deal.  And it won't be easy to replace, and I expect it will endure.  So that keeps me going.  On the data collector front, I may yet prevail.  We'll see. 

[Christopher Boss]

I think it is far too soon to start worrying about the future of PowerBasic. I think you are expecting too much from them at the moment. It has only been one month since Bob died and especially Vivian will likely have troubles getting used to this new situation. Most companies in this situation would likely take a couple months to sort things out.

I am sure Bob had hired plenty of good people in recent years so there is likely a good team in place to move forward. We just have to give them time to sort things out.

The best thing to do right now is "don't panic".

Even with PB 10 I personally have enough features to last me the next 10 years. About the only thing I would want might be 64 bit support, but even that is not critical yet.

I am a low level programmer, so I don't need all the bells and whistles many others need.

[Patrice Terrier]

Christopher

I think the situation of Bob Zale, relative to his compiler and is strong personnality, is exactly the same than yours with EZGUI.
All the critical code is/was within the head of one single guy, and in the case of PB, only the secondary tasks were left to "the team" 

Anyway, because we are all dying slowly, and because most of the PB community is part of the papy boom, most of them will be relunctant to move to something new, thus giving to third party addons some more time

...

[Christopher Boss]

Now with a developer like me, since I am a sole developer of course everything about EZGUI is in my head, but with the case of PowerBasic it is a company (a corporation) with a good number of employees who likely are responsible for coding PowerBasic. While we don't know how many and the things they do, they do have an R&D department responsible for research and development, which likely means Bob was not the sole R&D person.

I have to believe that Bob hired good people around him to do stuff like that.

Just think, people like Tom Hanlin had worked for PowerBasic for years in the past and Tom was an excellent assembly language programmer. So Bob, even years ago, had quality coders around him who could work on the core compiler, just like him.

[Patrice Terrier]

they do have an R&D department responsible for research and development

No, Mr Zale was himself the R&D, that's for sure, and this has not changed from the time of PBDK (that was the only exception).

...

[Theo Gottwald]

Patrice, I must say that  i have no real insight into "what happens at PB".
I only see the results and therefore i did an assumption on the style of things.

From feeling I'd say that some minor parts of PB - even of the compiler had been already done by some other person already in version 10.
While I assume that the great structure and the details were of course Bobs artwork.

[Rick McNeely]

PowerBasic website down at the moment.  Hope that's not a bad sign.

[José Roca]

I don't think so. There have been problems during all the month and probably they are trying to repair it.

[Chris Holbrook]

Let us hope that Mrs Zale is successful in finding an energetic developer or team to take the project on. Few of us are capable of inflating this particular tyre. José, you have done so much for this community, I hope that it continues to sustain your interest.

Maybe we should all put a few $$ into a pot and buy the company - then argue for ever about how to run it!

[Theo Gottwald]

In this situation i would had prefered if they say something before shutting down.
However, having such good products in stock it would not make sense to "shut down" like this.
Therefore i also expect them to come back.

[Carlo Pagani]

The sign for me will be the release of PB 10.04. There are a number of issues being resolved in that release and it would be a welcome Xmas present. I agree that the compiler can be used for many a year still, however it is also a motivator to explore other avenues, however painful it is for an old dog to learn new tricks.   We have not heard much from Tom Hanlin, which is a pity as it would give confidence to me knowing if he is still around.

[Patrice Terrier]

Thomas G. Hanlin III

[Carlo Pagani]

Interesting...Much of the site is DOS orientated.

I've run Hammerly Computer Services, EllTech, MicroHelp, and PowerBASIC. Much of what you've seen from them is my work. Oh, even a little Crescent Software. I have been a lot of the BASIC industry. Let's break loose and get funky with it. Products coming.

Well talk about blowing smoke up your own... , I hope that PB do find a suitable replacement, but in the mean time, with a sad nostalgic heart I will start digging around for plan B.