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LBB timeline and status
Post by Richard Russell on Nov 16th, 2015, 09:29am

Apparently somebody at the LB Community Forum commented that LBB was 'toast' (the comment has since been deleted). Perhaps it is an opportune moment to review where we are, where we came from and where we might be going.

22nd October 2011: LBB v1.00 released
Whilst largely compatible with LB's documented features, and able to run the example programs supplied with LB 4.04, many of LB's subtleties were not emulated accurately enough for a wide range of programs to run without modification.

15th June 2013: LBB v2.00 released
Maximum string length increased from 65535 bytes to 'unlimited', integers increased from 32 to 64 bits, floating-point numbers increased from 64 to 80 bits. Compatibility with LB 4 much improved.

4th March 2014: LBB v2.50 released
Debugger and Profiler added, making it practical to use LBB entirely independently of LB for the first time.

1st March 2015: LBB v3.00 released
Object Oriented Programming and Structured Exception Handling features added. Syntax Coloring implemented in the IDE.

April 2015: LBB discontinued sad
Having been banned from the LB Community Forum, making promotion of LBB effectively impossible, active development was abandoned and LBB entered a 'maintenance-only' phase.

Today
LBB remains in a stage of its life-cycle in which serious bugs will be fixed but otherwise no significant developments are likely to take place. A library file lb45func.bas supports all the new functions in LB 4.5.0.

The future
The possibility of making LBB Open Source, albeit with 'sensitive' features necessarily redacted, has been mooted. Reactions to this idea have been mixed, but it would in principle provide an opportunity for others to enhance both the language and the IDE.

Richard.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 16th, 2015, 10:40am

Start to stop in four years. Wow!

Quote:
... provide an opportunity for others to enhance both the language and the IDE.


Altruistic statement to say the least, but from my seat, I don't see the "others" out there.

Open source would benefit some, but a fractious LBB won't be worth messing with.

Of course, this is an LBB rookie opinion. cheesy

In the ideal case, you (Richard) would be the "supervisor" of enhanced development and quality control. That is probably not what you are interested in.

EDIT: Almost forgot.
Quote:
... commented that LBB was 'toast' ...

To be absolutely correct, the comment was closer to "... thought LBB was toast." A slight difference in semantics.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by Richard Russell on Nov 16th, 2015, 11:54am

on Nov 16th, 2015, 10:40am, pnlawrence wrote:
Start to stop in four years. Wow!

I wouldn't describe LBB's current state as stopped but more idling! And even in that state it's better supported than LB is by Carl: when Anatoly (tsh73) recently had problems with LBB because he'd inadvertently disabled Virtual Memory, within days I released a new version with customisable memory allocation. grin

Quote:
In the ideal case, you (Richard) would be the "supervisor" of enhanced development and quality control. That is probably not what you are interested in.

It's not so much that I am uninterested (of course I would like 'quality' to be maintained) but it's difficult to know how that could be achieved in practice. I would expect there at least to be some central repository for developments such as Sourceforge or Github.

Quote:
"... thought LBB was toast." A slight difference in semantics.

OK, noted. I wonder how he found out about its existence at all.

Richard.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 16th, 2015, 12:45pm

Quote:
I wouldn't describe LBB's current state as stopped but more idling!


Good thing you didn't describe it as "arrested development!" cheesy

Except for the 'sensitive' parts, is LBB mostly written in BASIC? If so, then perhaps open source would be more viable, but there still has to be some control or limited access involved. I suppose I'm exposing my ignorance on open source project development structures.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by Richard Russell on Nov 16th, 2015, 2:39pm

on Nov 16th, 2015, 12:45pm, pnlawrence wrote:
Except for the 'sensitive' parts, is LBB mostly written in BASIC?

Yes, it's mostly (BBC) BASIC - including the 'sensitive' parts. The IDE is about 7000 lines of code in all, of which all but 200 or so are fairly straightforward BASIC. It wouldn't require much skill to make modifications.

The run-time library LIBLIB is also mostly BASIC but it's probably too complex (and too risky) to expect anybody to mess with it. The debugger is all assembler code, so off-limits for the average BASIC programmer.

Richard.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by Mystic on Nov 16th, 2015, 10:22pm

Regardless of the direction it goes, I just want to say a huge THANK YOU Richard for what you have done so far.

You turned a frustrating development environment/language into something useable and something that is being updated regularly (even if it's mostly bug fixes).

What you have provided the LB community so far has been fantastic! I, for one, am very grateful.

I must also give kudo's to Carl. I love that Carl wrote/released Liberty BASIC and has supported it over the years (even though it is at a glacial pace). Richard's additional support has made it less frustrating!
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by sirguylittle on Nov 16th, 2015, 10:40pm

on Nov 16th, 2015, 11:54am, Richard Russell wrote:
I wonder how he found out about its existence at all.


I think LBB is easy enough to find, both Bing and Google list LBB on the first page of the search with an entry like this.

User Image

Also if interest, the Bing search also has a side section listing what people also search for and BBC BASIC is the first entry there smiley


PS also noticed that there is a mention of LBB on the Liberty BASIC wikipedia page under the heading 'Alternative implementations' and there is an external link to www.lbbooster.com

Quote:
In 2011 an alternative Windows implementation of Liberty BASIC, LB Booster (LBB), became available. Although substantially compatible with the Liberty BASIC 4 language syntax, LBB was developed entirely independently by Richard Russell and is written in BBC BASIC.

LBB offers (typically) increased execution speed, smaller self-contained executables and some additional capabilities. However LBB is not 100% compatible with LB4 and whilst many programs will run without modification some may need to be adapted, or even be unsuitable for running under LBB.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by Richard Russell on Nov 17th, 2015, 08:39am

on Nov 16th, 2015, 10:40pm, sirguylittle wrote:
I think LBB is easy enough to find, both Bing and Google list LBB on the first page of the search with an entry like this.

True, but I wonder why an existing LB user would choose to do a web search for 'Liberty BASIC', or indeed read the Wikipedia page.

Also I note that your search was (probably) made from the UK and search engines may produce different results - sometimes significantly different results - depending on where in the world the search is made from. The I Search From site can be useful in showing you what somebody living elsewhere would see if they did the same search.

I still suspect that a large proportion of LB users don't know that LBB exists.

Richard.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 17th, 2015, 09:53am

If I remember correctly, the LB forum user "hooshnik", had an older version of LBB and upgraded it to see if that corrected the problem he was having with "global reverts to old value".

So, not a new user.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 17th, 2015, 10:03am

If I search for "liberty basic", then "R. T. Russell" comes up about 15th. Then another mention comes up about the 10th page or around 100th.

If I search for "LB Booster", then it comes up all over the place.

I'm searching from Texas. cheesy
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by RNBW on Nov 17th, 2015, 11:02am

I think part of the problem is that LBB is used as a reference far more than LB Booster.
I did a search in LB for LB Booster (7000 days - much longer than it has been in existence) and only got 2 or 3 posts. I did likewise for LBB and got many more.
A search for LBB on Google brought nothing up on the first page. Unfortunately, that's about as far as some people look. It did pop up on the second page but under R.T. Russell LBB-BBC Basic.
Carl Gundel in a post on 6 March 2015 commented:
Quote:
Richard has indeed done interesting things with LBB, but now with version 3 he has added so much that it should probably be renamed because it isn't LB compatible anymore.

Perhaps a complete change of name which could be displayed on the first page of searches might be the answer to bring it to more peoples' attention.
Users of LBB know that it still retains a massive compatibility with LB, but it also has its own improvements and the link to the power of BBC Basic for Windows.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by Richard Russell on Nov 17th, 2015, 11:29am

on Nov 17th, 2015, 11:02am, RNBW wrote:
Carl Gundel in a post on 6 March 2015 commented:

I believe I remarked on the stupidity of that comment at the time. How Carl can think that adding functionality to LBB automatically impairs compatibility with LB I can't imagine!

In fact Carl doesn't set a good example himself. He has added new functions in LB 4.5.0 (after$(), upto$() etc.) which necessarily break compatibility with any existing LB program which happens to have used those same names either for an array or for a user-defined function.

By contrast I was very careful to ensure that the additions in LBB v3.00 were made in such a way that they could not break compatibility with existing programs. So in that particular respect you could argue that LBB is more compatible with LB 4.04 than LB 4.5.0 is!

Quote:
Perhaps a complete change of name which could be displayed on the first page of searches might be the answer

I disagree with that idea, as I have explained on previous occasions. It doesn't seem at all likely to me that existing LB users - even if they are dissatisfied with it - will be searching the web for an alternative if they have no inkling that something like LBB exists.

Richard.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 17th, 2015, 2:00pm

That does suggest that the "link" with "Liberty Basic" has run its course. Is there another direction that makes sense?
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 17th, 2015, 3:14pm

From an "outsider" and being new to LBB (Liberty Basic Booster) and LB, this is what I see.

I see Liberty Basic suffering for decades from lack of users, probably because of the drain from C and other languages. Generations of young programmers have grown up without putting a dime in the coffers for the development of Basic in general.

This has inevitably squeezed Mr. Gundel into, at best, developing LB as a one man development team with an obsession and at worst, as a hobby sidelined by needing to provide for his personal needs (eating etc.) This development cycle has extended so far that one has to ask the question, "How many versions of Windows will it take before Mr. Gundel runs out of steam?"

I see Richard Russell ("Richard" cheesy ) with a similar obsession to produce the best product that he can, also, but it seems to hang on a limited set of users of LB without a revenue stream of its own. I'm assuming that has always been by design, as stated by Richard. Richard has already reached the "no more development" stage.

The smaller the overall market for Basic gets, the more obsessed the developers and followers get.

I don't see a future if we "old folks" don't find a reason for continuing or audience to pass Basic on to.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by Richard Russell on Nov 17th, 2015, 3:16pm

on Nov 17th, 2015, 2:00pm, pnlawrence wrote:
That does suggest that the "link" with "Liberty Basic" has run its course. Is there another direction that makes sense?

I'm not too sure what point you are making, but I've always been (and remain) absolutely certain that LBB has no reason to exist other than as an implementation of Liberty BASIC. It makes so sense at all for it to 'stand alone' and to try to find a niche for itself in an already saturated market of BASIC dialects.

Having multiple 'competitive' implementations of a programming language is healthy; it hasn't done Fortran, C, Pascal and BBC BASIC - to name but a few - any harm!

Richard.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 17th, 2015, 3:23pm

Quote:
Having multiple 'competitive' implementations of a programming language is healthy; it hasn't done Fortran, C, Pascal and BBC BASIC - to name but a few - any harm!


Perhaps, in an altruistic way, but not in a commercial product as LB is.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by Richard Russell on Nov 17th, 2015, 4:09pm

on Nov 17th, 2015, 3:23pm, pnlawrence wrote:
Perhaps, in an altruistic way, but not in a commercial product as LB is.

What makes you say that? Do you think C or Pascal have somehow 'suffered' from the proliferation of implementations from different vendors? Would you rather that Visual C or GCC, say, had a monopoly of the market for Windows C compilers?

My view is the complete opposite. Without competition commercial products, especially, can stagnate; indeed you can argue that's exactly what has happened to Liberty BASIC. Of course in the case of LB, instead of the competition from LBB stimulating Carl to improve his product, his 'supporters' are trying to shield him from it.

Quote:
Generations of young programmers have grown up without putting a dime in the coffers for the development of Basic in general.

Surely that isn't correct. Look at the way BASIC (and BBC BASIC in particular) has been influential in the teaching of programming in schools in the UK since the 1980s. Although that has declined significantly in the intervening years, even today BBC BASIC is one of only a few languages which are approved by the relevant UK authorities as being suitable for teaching programming. This student's book has a whole chapter on BBC BASIC.

Quote:
without a revenue stream of its own. I'm assuming that has always been by design

Indeed it has never been, and never will be, my intention that LBB should provide a "revenue stream". I have a commercial product (BBC BASIC), although even that does not exist primarily as a source of income. You have referred to "obsessions", I wonder if you are unduly preoccupied with financial considerations.

Richard.
Re: LBB timeline and status
Post by joker on Nov 17th, 2015, 4:53pm

Quote:
I wonder if you are unduly preoccupied with financial considerations. {my edit}

Well, of course! cheesy

I understand the controversy that the LB supporters have created, but I think you could easily ignore it if you had a larger user base. Especially one that was supporting further development.

Actually, I really don't understand why Mr. Gundel isn't desperately involved in some kind of merger of LB and LBB. Especially since you've expressed your interest in moving it into the public domain.

It is hard for me to understand that you don't see my " Generations of young programmers " comment as a cause for Basic " has declined significantly in the intervening years ". We have so many devices running now, and I dare to say next to none of them can be programmed from/with Basic.

As Basic is my only programming language, it even sounds strange to me that I'm being such a "booBird." I am trying to get my son and potentially my grandson involved with programming, but the draw for them is to gadgets like the PI.

I'm starting to wonder why I'm messing with LB and not learning BBC Basic straight on. undecided