> I'd like to know why everyone is using REALbasic.  There are other tools
> out there.  There are other languages out there.  Why REALbasic?

I switched to RB a couple of years ago, and I'm loving it. I first started
writing software with BASIC for the TRS-80, and despite occasional forays
into assembler and C, I'm a die-hard BASIC fan, and I've tried a lot of them
over the years. RB is great because it's a modern object-oriented language
that has the "look and feel" of BASIC. It does a pretty good job of
cross-platform compiling, and while it's not perfect, it does give me access
to the various OS's API's and such when specific adaptations are needed for
each platform without making me write my program in API's, as it were.

And for the record, I'm currently working on a *very* large application
(about 180,000 lines of code), which is marketed globally and competes on
various levels with programs like Filemaker and Excel.

Unless you're writing in C or C++, the language you're using is going to be
proprietary (and even those can be remarkably dependent on which libraries
you choose). No language is perfect, and never will be. And just like every
other piece of software ever written, compilers have bugs, too. Every
release of RB is better than the one that preceded it, and while bugs may
not be fixed as fast as we'd like, RS is no worse at it than 90% of other
software companies, chief among them Microsoft. (Have you ever tried to get
Visual Basic's printer object to keep its page orientation correct in
between print jobs? (That bug's been around for 10 years and it still isn't
fixed!) I'm thrilled that RB releases updates 4 times a year.

And if enough people on this list make enough noise about how much they hate
RB, then the word will spread and RealSoft will close its doors, which would
be a real shame. Personally, I love RB and want to give it every opportunity
to succeed. Let's keep this list a useful forum for idea sharing and helping
each other, not a stomping ground for the disaffected.

Just my .02, of course -

- John


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