TwinBASIC is a modern BASIC compiler

Interesting justification for their subscription model [0]:

> Naturally, developers benefit from the subscription model by having a more regular income, but customers also benefit because they hold more power over the developer to fix bugs and provide regular updates in mind of you keeping your repeat subscription active.

I'd love to learn of cases for subscription software where subscribed customers were able to successfully pressure a developer to fix bugs by threatening to not resubscribe. Wouldn't bug and feature bounties be a better solution, if indeed empowering customers is the true reason for subcriptions?

I can see how subscriptions might be good for the subset of customers for whom it is easier to use opex funds to subscribe, rather than capex funds for perpetual licenses. It can be the difference between simply submitting a expense report versus going through a months-long series of committee meetings.

[0] https://twinbasic.com/preorder.html

$35 a month for BASIC ? Seriously? Subscriptions have gotten completely out of hand.

As i mentioned in the other thread about VB6, this is not the only attempt and there have been several at the past, going back to when Microsoft was still working on classic VB (the oldest i know of is a VB4 clone) - and all of them had something common: they were not open source and because of that they died.

IMO it is the biggest of follies to consider a proprietary classic VB clone considering that the only reason VB6 died was exactly because its developer decided to stop working on it - it wasn't due to lack of money (Microsoft wasn't broke) or popularity (AFAIK TIOBE had it at #1 at the time and for a long time after that), it was plainly because the only one in control was Microsoft and since it was a deeply proprietary product nobody else could do anything about it (aside from making useless polls that were obviously ignored).

BBC BASIC is still available and maintained by one of its original developers, an astonishing record.

https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/index.html

The Windows version is a £25 purchase, but the SDL and command-line versions are gratis. It's a great language for hacking around on a Raspberry Pi.

VB.net is a second class citizen in the new .Net ecosystem (.Net Core/5/6/7)

"Microsoft: 'We Do Not Plan to Evolve Visual Basic as a Language'" https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2020/03/12/vb-in-n...

MS is actively trying to get people to switch to C# for .Net