Dear all,
I can't believe that it will be the end of such a powerful development environment, made of both PowerBASIC and FireFly.
I can't believe that no one will take over the company and continue to develop the raw compiler; it is so efficient in terms of code and productive for the programmer; I use FireFly everyday and I've been successful in developing business applications.
Beside the PowerBASIC compiler made by Bob Zale, the visual designer made by Paul Squires, the headers and hundreds of wrappers made by Jose Roca, other genius programmers contribute (or have contributed) to this community:
- James Klutho with MyLittleGrid
- Fred Meier with SQLitening
- Rainer Morgen with the RMChart
- Chris Bristow with SiGrid
So thank you all; I'll continue to use your tools; you gave me the guts to come back to programming; If I can do something myself to contribute to the continuity of this environnment, I will do it.
I can't believe that these first class tools will not evolve any-more.
Regards,
Jean-Pierre
Thanks Jean-Pierre,
FireFly is not dead... it's kind of on life support :) If PowerBasic should rebound from its current situation then I would most likely continue with FF development at a more aggressive pace.
As you can imagine, the 3rd party market for PB is relatively extremely small. It depends on an ever increasing intake of new users to the PB language to generate new sales for FireFly. Of course, I could start the practice of nickel and diming existing FireFly customers for minor updates but I haven't done that in the 15 years of being a 3rd party vendor so starting now is just being greedy and disrespectful to all you great guys who have purchased and supported FF over the years.
Most of you know that I started work on FF4. I prototyped a new object oriented type of syntax for the FireFly Functions. I had a working version for a new Menu Editor. I refactored the FF generated code to make it more compact and less verbose. I even added UNICODE support within the generated code - it hasn't been greatly tested, but at least its there. I cleaned up the user interface and made it look nicer for Windows 8 and simplified some dialogs (the most notable being the startup dialog where you create a new project, open an existing one, etc.). The majority of remaining work would be on the code editor. Lots of clean up needed there to improve undo/redo and to expand the Code Completion / Codetips stuff. Many, many, many hours need to be devoted to that. I was even toying with the idea of adding that Debugger prototype I showed you guys.
Long story short, there is a hell of a lot of remaining work needed to produce a viable FF4 product. That's a lot of work with very little downstream payoff for me unfortunately.