I'm thinking about this a lot. How to make B4X more popular? What are the barriers who prevent B4X from growing?
Making B4A free removes one barrier and I'm sure that in the long run it will have a positive effect. Making the core libraries open source will also help.
About BASIC. There isn't too much to say here. The programming language is B4X. For better or for worse its syntax is close to BASIC and it will not be changed.
The real challenge is how to increase the exposure of new developers to B4X. I need your help here. If you like B4X encourage other developers to give it a try.
There is a large and active community here and this community is the key for further growth.
Just a few points that I can think of right away:
-- The IDE is not multi-platform. Most developers these days no longer WANT to use Windows, they prefer macOS or Linux. Being Windows-only in this time and age is a huge problem that's holding the product back.
-- Students learn JavaScript, Java, C++, C# and maybe Python in school. The people that are still interested in a modern BASIC dialect are around my age (50) who have grown up with BASIC, are comfortable with it and find it efficient for application development. We were born in a time when BASIC was as ubiquitous as Python is today. But BASIC, just like the back then extremely popular Pascal, fell into niche status, marked for extinction.
-- This leads to the big question: How do you attract YOUNG developers that only learn other programming languages at school or on the Internet?
-- And WHY should they even bother learning a niche language like B4X when Kotlin and Java are the officially supported languages for Android, Swift is the officially supported language for macOS and iOS, JavaScript runs in every browser and every web page uses it and Java and Kotlin run even in a coffee machine. But MOST IMPORTANTLY - EVERYBODY uses JavaScript and Java. That doesn't make those two languages good or even better programming languages, but it makes them dialects of the English language of computing. Python follows closely behind, and then comes good old C (not C++).
-- So in today's job market, JavaScript, Java, Python and a member of the C-dialect are what you need to land a good job, and you're learning all of those at school. And that is more than enough to learn when you're at the beginning of your career. There simply is no space - or need - to learn a niche programming language that is not called Go or Rust. It's a very tough sale.
-- Then there is the question of available literature, books, web pages and the state of the documentation, that in many cases just consists of a brief list of method declarations. There is no proper or thorough reference documentation, there is not enough training material and if you want to find a proper training course for it online, forget about it. B4X would need books in the league of "Python Crash Course by E.H. Matthes", "Python in a nutshell by Alex Martelli", "Programming Python by Mark Lutz" or the legendary "The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan" and, of course, something like "Android Studio Development Essentials by Neil Smyth" and at least one "Head First B4X" book, preferably written by a teacher that is as good as Kathy Sierra or E.H. Matthes or Charles Petzold or Mark Lutz -- these people produce labors of love, their works are not just excellent books.
-- There still is no famous or widely known killer application out there that has been written in B4X.
-- Not even the B4X IDEs are written in B4X! That was the reason why some people back in the day took it on themselvers to write the SharpDevelop IDE in C#, to prove that a complex application could be written in that new programming language. In comparison, the BlitzMax IDE was written in BlitzMax.
---- BlitzMax was abandoned by the original developer a few years ago and went full open source and is still maintained by some loyal fans -- it's an AMAZING multi-platform, object-oriented BASIC dialect that produces native code for each support target operating system. But it suffers from the same issues B4X suffers from, and I remember the exact same discussions on the BlitzMax forums over a decade ago. That being said, when I worked for Alaska Software back at the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s, our programming language called Xbase++, which was a modern version of Clipper, suffered from those very same issues as well and the users were having the same discussions. Xbase++ is still on the market, but it's still a very small niche language with a following that on average has reached the retirement age by now, despite being an extremely powerful and highly productive programming language, Xbase++ never managed to attract young or new users.
-- Just think for a second about making COBOL attractive to a new generation of software developers. I rest my case.
-- It took Python almost 30 years to get where it is today - and the major incompatibility of version 2 and version 3 of that language almost killed it (like PERL is now dead not only because of Python, but because the successor of Perl 5 became a completely new programming language). In recent years, Python became so big because SCIENTISTS widely adopted it, mainly in bio-informatics or for machine learning. And A LOT of authors wrote books about it to teach kids how to use it. Why? Because Python is today what BASIC was back in the 1970s/1980s: An easy language to learn that does it ALL ("batteries included"), and it is available on ALL computing platforms - free of charge. Heck, there are even ready made modules available that can communicate to the plant sensors that we use in the greenhouses of our research institute. The Python ecosystem just kills it - there really is a module for EVERYTHING. It's near to impossible to compete with such a vast ecosystem of FREE third party libraries.
So this is all rather depressing right now. My love for niche programming language has led me down similar roads before, but I've also learned that I'm not alone in my love for BASIC dialects. There have always been plenty of others, and they were all looking for a safe haven. This simply means that there IS a market.
But here is one more huge problem: I have absolutely no clue how Anywhere Software plans on monetizing a free ("as in beer") development product. Truth be told, the fact that B4A is now available free of charge is nice, but seeing that it is being developed by an army-of-one, Erel, is actually a major issue of concern. If I were a commercial software developer, it would be extremely unwise to bet my existence on a product that could go out of business over night. Open Sourcing B4X would not really help, because there won't be enough public interest to keep the product alive. The BlitzMax disaster has shown me that people will just move on over time - and BlitzMax had a big community in the game development scene. (But the developer offered a new product and new - incompatible - language at the time, so people moving on was to be expected.)
I doubt, though, that open sourcing B4X could even be a legally feasible option at this point; there are probably several third party libraries used in the product whose licenses would make such a step impossible. Also, I don't actually think that "free as in speech" would actually help at this point.
Making B4X more popular would require:
-- MARKETING and LOBBYING, and LOTS of it
-- A very visible success story!
-- Proper documentation as in MANY third party books, training offerings and developer conferences
-- A multi-platform IDE (written in the language itself to showcase its power)
It's not a technological problem. But someone needs to throw money at these problems, and how do you get that money back when you offer a free product???
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