I would be cautious with this assessment.
VisualBasic .NET is alive, PureBasic as swiss knife aswell, not to mention all the free and open source, not commercial Basic Dialects like Freebasic and Gambas with their Communities.
With a few users and not the majority of users. And they are not really alife. Also purebasic isn’t the cash cow but a small project driven from enthusiasts. That’s okay but it is not a surviving.
PureBasic is almost as old as Java, it’s not likely to fade away over night.
1 Like
strongly disagree VB .NET and even plentora of WSH and Office Scripts are still out in a lot of smaller and bigger companies. Recently I saw on German TV a case where Win95 still is used at a farm counting eggs 
even the printer is not beige anymore… it’s kinda brownish 
2 Likes
I bought a lifetime license for PureBasic 22 years ago and I’m still getting updates. All during that time there have been prophets of doom saying PureBasic won’t be around much longer.
Another plus is in all that time the developers of PureBasic have always played with a straight bat, I’m very confident there’ll be no sudden moving of the goal posts to try and shaft their user base.
1 Like
Yes there are a few solutions in this example in 30 years old machines. They may use it still. And? Who uses it for new projects? I guess that’s the fast question. Also other Basic dialects: who uses them for commercial projects and not hobby projects?
Yes, there are a few. Looking on C#, Python, GO, C++, Java and so on: this are Millions of users. There is a difference between: there is somebody using a 30 years old machine or building new Software projects in modern environments. That’s exactly the point. If PureBasic or Xojo would be really succsessful: wouldN#t there be a bigger movement within the time? Like for example with Java, C++, C#, Python, PHP and other languages? Or is it so that it is normal that this systems are not really in a wide functional development?
It is what it is: a simple small project that survived. And that will also find one day it’s end.
As an addon: it is definitely a good tool but not for commercial development of enterprise apps. So if you will need only it’s functioonality: good. If you need more: bad.
BASIC language syntax. There is nothing inherently wrong with it. Its only downfall is that too many people still equate it to “Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”… which 90% of all modern dialects passed years and years ago.
BASIC uses ``For I=1 to 10: Next I```
Swift uses “for i in(1…10) {}```
those BOTH do the same thing, but is one “better” than the other? Not in my opinion
4 Likes
oh please Thorsten, step a little more back… just recently I’ve made a nice Purebasic Project for a customer. Why Purebasic? The customer can adopt this with more ease.
1 Like
Agreed. I think that a lot of the anti-basic backlash came from professional developers that saw the crap code their non-professional developer colleagues were producing without ever thinking that maybe it was their training and experience that made their code ‘better’ and not the language itself. That and basic was an interpreted language at first. But then no one complains about Python being interpreted but it’s not ‘basic’ so no one complains.
I personally think that the name change from REALbasic was good (for the above reasons). It was unfortunate that they chose Real Studio which is too generic. Xojo, I feel is a decent (made up) name but is hard for non-English speakers and even now, years later, I see people using XoJo, XOJO and when speaking calling in Ex Oh Jay Oh.
2 Likes
One developer with it and how many with C, C++ and so on? Sorry but it is a really little niche. Nothing else. Yes, you can build apps like this. I can also build them in nearly every other language. In most cases I don’t even hyve to write it completely while libraries available. Again: you can do that. And you can sell that. But most will not do it. And for commercial projects it will in nearly no case be accepted.
At the end: it is a basic language and that will not change. There is no possible change in it. You can writ Software with it. But the quality depends on you not the rest.
Software Quality ALWAYS depends on the Developer… Don’t blame the tools
5 Likes
I remember years and years ago, someone recommended REALBasic to me. It looked interesting, but I was too busy with my career as a database dev to spend time with it. But I would check in on the forums from time to time.
A couple years went by and then I took another look. The old RB website was redirected to Xojo, and I thought “wow” REALBasic got bought out by some foreign (non-western) company. I thought it meant they must be doing well for themselves. Little did I know…
2 Likes
VB.Net is on life support as far as I can tell
No new features are going to get added so it will slowly die on the vine
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2020/03/12/vb-in-net-5.aspx
There are other Basic’s
Many of them are similarly niche products like Xojo is
Anecdotes though
These arent widespread usages, increasing VB’s popularity etc
As a GENERAL example they are illustrative
Fun niche cases sure
I had a consulting client (leads have really dried up, but that’s another story) who did exactly that. 
Yes there is not a big amount of consulting clients left cause the most ones ran away already. That said you can see that there is a big movement. Also as I spoke last year with a bigger plugin vendor he said that the XoJo Business ran out of big revenues. That’s a simple problem cause then XoJo by self has also losses in their revenue. And you can see that on their new pricing strategy.
1 Like
Perhaps if they changed the name to Bozo they might attract a whole new clientele - circus clowns.
I had more than a few consulting clients that pronounced it that way. That’s what you get with a made up name with questionable pronunciation.
And yes, leads have really dried up (though I no longer have a current Pro license to get leads). The leads fell off a cliff for us starting in 2019.
There was a point in time that most of our clients contacted us directly without going through the Xojo system. Some of the traffic was because of the blog, some because of the products (Shorts, ActiveRecord), and some was because of the training videos. By 2019 I was openly questioning WTF they were doing with API 2 and wondering who their target audience was, no one was buying the software products (in large part because of API 2), and I had to pull all the training videos because of API 2 and there was no way I was going to redo 200 hours of video for API 2.
I do not miss consulting much as it’s like drinking from a firehose. When you’re super busy you bring in a lot of money and when you’re not busy you’re not. I enjoy being a worker bee again with steady hours and steady paychecks. I do miss the flexibility and variety a bit but not having to worry about finding clients for next week/month/quarter/year is really nice. I have new challenges and have learned a new languages and still get to work a bit in Xojo (tho mostly converting FROM Xojo).
3 Likes
The renaming does not change the content. It is still a basic language. In case of XoJo for example compared with PureBasic XoJo is a lame duck. It depends on the technology they use and also on the buggy state of the compiler. If they would have a native compiler for every platform the world would be better.
But there comes up a little problem: compiling from every Desktop platform to every Desktop platform or Web platform or Android is possible with Xojo. That isn’t the case with PureBasic. And the “near native" Gui of XoJo is also a plus you’ll have.
At the end the pureBasic code will run much faster as the XoJo one.
This example describes also what you will get buying XoJo: slow Code with many Bugs behind and a risk that there will come an API 3 / 4 / 5.
This makes it impossible to rely on your code if you are not lucky enough. I had a few customers which had exactly that problem. With Web 1 and with desktop apps. All of them had to rewrite their applications. Some changed to C#, some changed to a Java solution, twi of them changed to Swift/SwiftUI solution while only on Mac.
Nobody of them wanted the same problem again in a few years. And all of them realized that there is also the risk of an END of XoJo. So, at the end there is nothing else to do than searching for a new platform. Can be PureBasic. Can be C++ with QT (had I guess three which changed to this solution, may be it was one more, I would have to ask one of my employees). At the end they are all more satisfied with the new solution. Yes, the learning curve is hard, no question. But the capabilities of the languages was deciding that change.
It is sad that Xojo has a so bad performance and a so bad support for the future.