I actually wouldn't mind a "real" basic rather than VB.net from MS. I just finished a class on VB 6 and tried to migrate to VB.net...it's insane what they changed! (I was supposed to be in a C/C++ class, but it was cancelled)
Basic sucks! I don't even want to think about VB.net!
I've worked on several VB or other basic projects. I tried to get them to use C/C++ or Java but they never listen!
I used to work with a group of miggy programmers that wanted to use compiled basic for commercial apps. Why? One had used QuickBasic and didn't want to learn C. I wrote the low level code to load pictures, cycle colors, load sounds, play sounds, move mouse pointers... you name it. My sample apps were tiny, fast, and pretty simple really. The commercial programs were big, slow and unprofessional looking. It was the best use of basic I've seen by far but still nothing close to what was possible in C/C++.
One they refused to go to C++ because of how long they had spent on the GUI in VB and they said it would take too long to port and would end up buggy because "C++ is more difficult to program in". I stayed late one evening and built 90% of it over in C++. I showed it to them and they just came up with other lame excuses. The VB app had bugs related to plug-ins and the VB compiler itself. An external data migration tool written in VB took hours to run and it was supposed to run EVERY NIGHT! NO WAY! I ported the data migration tool to C++ in a couple hours, it took less than 5 minutes to run and it performed data verification the VB app didn't! Too bad the data was allways bad... you know why? It ported data from the mainframe running...
Pick Basic which kept corrupting the data tree!
Another project I tried to get people to use C++ on involved a VB GUI and a C++ DLL with the database / business logic code. All C++ code was done within a couple days (usually a couple hours) after mod requests while it took forever to work out bugs in the VB. Some code worked under one version of the compiler and not another... so guess what version was used to build the releases? The buggy version! Oh yeah, and another buggy VB plug-in. We could have done the job with HALF the people and less bugs if it had all been C++.
The last project was for a SAN designer/simulator for a network switch manufacturer. It involved a VB GUI to design a network visually and a Java app to build the data files for the company's switch simulators (used serialized Java obects to store the info... best example of how not to do something I've ever seen). Getting VB to generate a simple text file with the SAN info made the programmer jump through hoops! The Java code dealing with it took a less than two days. Extracting the code from the switch simulators (different for ever switch type) was another matter but still only took 3 days. The VB still had bugs at delivery.
My Windows pop-up killer was written in VB. Guess what happens when you run out of memory. CRASH! Typical of every VB app I've seen.
VB SUCKS! Pick Basic sucks! Oh hell... BASIC SUCKS!
:-x