ExtremeBasic

This afternoon Kris asked if I was still in touch with Carbon programming for some Quicktime project he's doing. Honestly it's been so long since I've written any code that I wasn't sure if re-learning the syntax and looking up the API calls would be worth the effort. And so I recommended that he look into a RAD language like Realbasic.

For some inexplicable reason I was wondering what Andrew Barry, the person responsible for a large part of Realbasic's initial success (he wrote practically all the code in the first few releases) was doing as I half-remembered that he was looking into doing something similar after leaving Real Software. Sure enough there was link to his new BASIC interpreter called ExtremeBasic, and although it's now in alpha, it shows great promise.

The reason why you should care is that if you've taken any Object Oriented Programming 101 class far too much time is spent on maintaining the class hierarchy. To get a sense of things it takes less than 20 lines of code to get a text editor working in Realbasic.

The other thing that takes up a lot of time is the user interface, and a RAD with an IDE like Realbasic and ExtremeBasic is just going to be several orders of magnitude faster than having to go through hundreds of lines of text at a time, although this is mitigated somewhat by improving releases of xCode from Apple.

Typically RAD languages are slow from a performance standpoint but it seems that one of the design goals of ExtremeBasic is to allow inline C++ code compilation, with a related feature and that's not having to learn Yet Another Plugin Architecture to extend functionality since everyone knows C++... right? Right? :p

Can't wait to see how the final version turns out. Stay tuned...