Powerbasic.com went dark

Following the recent discussion about XOJO, I asked myself, how is Power Basic doing? Back in the 80ies it was my first serious language when it was Borland Turbo-BASIC. I’ve made my first money with small dos helper tools as student in my holidays.

For many years in this forum I am holding the opinion that Xojo will follow its fate if “our genius” doesn’t change course and open source XOJO before it’s too late.

Well now powerbasic.com silently gone dark since December 2023 regarding Waybackmachine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20230101000000*/powerbasic.com

RIP Powerbasic
Bob Zale already gone since 2012
His legacy continue to live in today’s freebasic

As many companies have discovered open source isnt just “give it away” its also a business model

But not all

Not sure how it might apply to Xojo since open sourcing the compiler & IDE would be tricky at best and awful at worst since Xojo’s role would be drastically revised to do more management of contributions that the authoring of them

Not saying it cant work but the mindset change required would be significant
And I’m not sure there is any willingness to try it

A lot of companies make money by consulting using the tool they created. But Xojo has repeatedly said they have no interest in this. I know because I had this conversation several times with Geoff.

This is a shame because it would have been a revenue stream, been truly eating their own dogfood, and using it like all of their users. Plus, it would be a good way to get white papers, use cases, marketing material, and so on for the tool.

But WTF do I know, eh?

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All of this languages will go this way. Nobody wants to use it in industrial environments and nobody wants to hang on old days technologies. That’s the point. Also Xojo has the risk of going down under. As it is not one of the top level languages it is dangerous while it can always be at its end.

When this will happen people will not have any chance for working with it further for longer times. And all people know exactly that. With languages like C# or C++ this problem will not be possible. Also with Java not. This is one of the reasons why this languages are so often in use. The other is the needed ecosystem. Yes, MBS has builded up a wide range of tools. But it is not like in other languages like C# or Java.

So there is a good chance for all this people using languages like Xojo that it will become dark one day. Xojo is a one man show. Said this we can look on it: it is the product of Geoff Perlman, nothing else.

People told me within years how good Xojo is and how wonderful. But sad to say: it is not and it was not. In old Apple times it was interesting. But not interesting enough for Apple by self to use it. Java was more interesting even for Apple.

You may concern that it is an industrial level language but it is definitely not. Not it’s quality management, not it’s support, not its functionality.

As result I could also say: this old concepts are looking from time to time nice but they are not in use. Languages which are as a niche product in use should be used by all parts of the niche. But looking on this I can say: no, not at all. Only a few enthusiasts are using it.

So PowerBasic is a good example for that what follows. As Languages like GO, Python, Flutter/Dart, C#, Java are providing functionality and ecosystem around what they do I don’t believe that Xojo has a real chance to become one of the top 50 languages in the market. And it is not. Even R, a statistic language, is much more in use.

Speaking about the users I had to read about so many things which are better to do with Xojo I could by self not say exactly that. Looking on native: running native programs the native languages are interesting. And quite fast to learn. Looking on X-Platform I can say Xojo is not really. It is multi platform but not Cross Platform. As there are many differences between the platforms it is not possible to run the same program on Desktop, Web and mobile. So if I have to write one Android, one IOS, one Web and one Desktop-Application it is not that far away to use different native languages for this for mobile (Swift, Kotlin/Java) and for Desktop (Swift, C++ for Linux and Windows).

I don’t get the need for the product while there is no win/win situation at all. Asking most people I found nobody with his application on all platforms. The other way around. Most applications are written for Windows or MacOS. A few are written for Windows and MacOS and a very few are written for Linux. And yes, there is no reason to do it different if the application is an internal app. But is there outside a big amount of successful commercial applications? I can’t see this at all.

The sad part is: it will catch all of this languages. Even Xojo. There will come the day Xojo is dark. And that is a normal process. At the end we have to say: it is already in the middle of this process. They could rescue it over the last decade. But the success times are gone.

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this! and there are exactly two solutions for this dilemma:

  1. find some bigtech/investor
  2. open source it

Open sourcing would not help. It is not possible to maintain it. And it would be the end for the inc. while no incomes anymore. It is at it’s end

nah this has been always a hoax… of course you can make money with open source software…

but not Xojo. Trust me. Open source runs when there is a userbase

in memoriam i turned on my 36 year old Euro-PC…


still missing the debugger and watcher, which stops e.g. when a variable changes

fun fact: this old piece starts up its operating system faster than todays pc’s, within 9 Seconds… from floppy disk! I’ve made a video here:

i am an old fart…

My first computer was an Acorn BBC-B with 32K of ram and flexible floppies. It is still working today. You are surprised what you could do with that machine.

In the highest graphical mode there was a little less than 5 Kb over for your program. I never used Goto or Gosub but procedures and functions. It was its time far ahead.

Nowadays I have BBC Basic For Windows, which delivers single file executables. I only program it in my scarce free time. But I still love the language despite it is procedural.

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this already i knew from Commodore C64, the language was called COMAL, like a weird mix of Pascal and Basic, but it was procedural

bunch of youngsters… The first non-Mainframe computer I used, I had to BUILD… took 6 months, had a z80, 4mhz, 48K of Ram

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Fun Fact: The NEC v20 of the Schneider Euro-PC is an 8088, this means it is compatible with everything in the x86 but 8080 aswell. The whole CP/M universe lies at my fingertips :wink: twice the speed (9.54 Mhz and plenty of more RAM)