On 1/10/2024 1:07 PM, mjos_examine wrote:

Outside of UNIX, and beyond VMS, I think BASIC did have a pretty good
run in the 90's and early 2000's, particularly on the Windows desktop platform.

Visual Basic (classic, producing native applications) was popular in the 90's, especially.

Mid 90's and up to early 00's before business GUI's went all web,
then VB6 was king of business GUI's. VB6 was way more used than
Delphi, Jyacc etc..

Eventually, .NET came along and they switched Visual Basic over to
producing managed applications, but C# quickly overtook BASIC in
popularity there.

C# was the language being pushed as the language to learn. VB.NET
was the language for those already knowing VB. 20 years forward
and VB.NET is niche due to natural change in developer population.

Also, back when MS introduced their scripting host, vbscript was a very popular language for that. Powershell's introduction is probably what
changed that landscape.

MS only shipped VBScript and JScript. VBS was by far the most popular.
But scripting host was a little bit more programming centric than shell.
Great for traversing file system or registry, but not good for typical
shell operations on files.

(and VBS was also used a lot in ASP Classic)

I think Visual Basic for Applications was also popular for macros and automation within the MS Office suite back in the day.

Especially in Access the VBA often turned into significant
programming - more than macros/automation.

++++

Besides MS there were also other PC Basic flavors. Most notable:
Borland TurboBasic later PowerBasic.

And the open source world got FreeBASIC for Windows/Linux/FreeBSD.
Even though I have never tried it.

Arne

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