On Jun 24, 2008, at 11:46 AM, John Grimsley wrote: > Christopher, > > Great information. I stumbled across BlitzMax (games mostly, cross > platform) a few weeks ago. The Demo was from mid-2006. Any > thoughts about whether they are coming or going? Time is precious. Okay... disclaimer: I want to see the FB team not only keep FB alive, but "modernize" (Cocoa / Aqua visual controls) aspects of the language. Development always thrives where there are options: witness Web scripting and the richness resulting from Ruby vs. Perl vs. PHP. Turns out, all the languages benefit from competition. I think Blitz is here to stay -- some great games have been created with it. However, Blitz has struggled to develop a good GUI designer. There is also talk of support for CoreData in a future edition; people forget game maps and such are often complex databases. I love the other BASIC dialects, but only Blitz seems likely to survive in the "procedural" realm on OS X, and it could drop OS X if they can't integrate Cocoa technologies. If I had unlimited funds and time, I would definitely try to merge the concepts of CocoaBASIC with FutureBASIC to create one heck of a Mac programming tool for the masses. I'm not wedded to the past -- take the GPL'd CocoaBASIC and tweak it to have more "QuickBASIC-like" syntax. REALbasic will go on, but it should be pointed out that several of the RB compiler experts were hired by Microsoft -- just as MS announced VBA would return to MS Office. There's a reason MS would hire BASIC compiler experts. I actually developed a complete grammar for a data-centric BASIC and played around with ANTLR. Unfortunately, my research post is for autism and atypical neurology -- not programming. Unfortunately, for PowerBASIC, PureBASIC, DarkBASIC, et al, (I'm not counting Liberty), the focus remains Windows and Linux development. DB and PB both have internal Linux betas, but Bob Zale at PowerBASIC won't comment on any tool before its release. Liberty had an OS X beta, but they ceased development on OS X after struggling with, you guessed it, the GUI designer. - CSW