Re: Phix 1.0.2 uploaded
- Posted by RobertS Mar 04, 2023
- 2434 views
What I notice in this forum, though, is that the target audience seems strictly to be IT professionals — different from the days of RDS Euphoria, which, "Simpler than Basic, More Powerful than C+ +" had catered to a much wider audience. But I don't know, maybe this audience doesn't even exist anymore …
I'm curious why you think this. I think the issue is mostly that we've sat and stagnated over the past decade while many other languages with similar appeal have marched forward. The market exists, we're just not appealing to it (right now).
-Greg
From what I saw in the 1980s and into the 90s, almost everybody rightly or wrongly felt that knowing a computer language and being able to write their own little programs was an integral part of having a computer at home. Since those computers well into the PC era came with BASIC being hard-wired into them, BASIC was the obvious choice of language. In the 90s the search for "better" languages began, GUIs and the Internet arrived, MS dumped BASIC … but for a while, people were still interested in coding. I remember in the late 90s a friend told me she was learning Java, I asked her why, and she kind of shrugged, well, you have to learn _some_ computer language, don't you? When BASIC was dead I tried Perl, found it highly unsatisfactory, looked around, came across Euphoria, liked its looks and was intrigued by the object data type, as, I suppose, were others. If you look at the rapideuphoria.com site, it still says "Search 2000 contributed programs," "Search 92,000 posted messages in Original EUforum," and "Access the brain-power of hundreds of Euphoria programmers." Those were the days — I'm afraid people don't use their computers that way anymore, they have social media and their cell phones to spend their time on — who, among the general population, still feels that when they own a computer, they should know how to code? But, I don't know who the potential new users of Euphoria or Phix might be today, so, I can't really say anything useful …
Robert
