ProvideX CONNEXION

Tales from the darker side: A lighter view of the other side

By Jean Hendrickx

Some time ago in the mid-1990s, I tried to convince myself that Business BASIC programming was a big advantage. I’ve never been a programmer and never faced a big programming project. When writing utilities and specialized programs, I had to reassign any program with more than 500 lines to the programming staff. Business BASIC was nice and simple, but so simple that many times I found myself remembering my old 'C' days. While known as powerful, Business BASIC had that simplicity, a lack of directives and verbs that made me feel uncomfortable. I needed a Business BASIC language, but one with some real muscle!

I remember meeting Tom Langelaar at a Business BASIC trade show in San Diego, and he gave me two floppies (those soft black rectangles used back when the computers had names) and he said to me, “Try this!” But when I returned home, I left the floppies on the table, mixed up with pens, brochures, other floppies, a lot of stickers, and other “trinkets” gathered from the convention.

A problem arose, I had the available tools and I tried to convince myself that Business BASIC is a great language. But always, it was as if something was missing. The initial punch disappeared and as the language evolved, so did my feelings. I needed more tools. Better tools! The computing community asked for a Visual interface and my Business BASIC language had just released a Visual version! Good! But the new tool that was expected to make many tasks easier, did just the opposite. The ‘easy way’ began to look not so easy and the expected tools never came.

Just before throwing away the disks that Tom gave me, I decided to install the BBIcon language named ProvideX, which was a funny sounding name to me. Well, I was glad because I liked the approach. Any GUI control (Button, Checkbox, and more) had a “ConTroL” value, so by checking the CTL variable, we can know which button was pressed. A simple and straightforward method! I found myself being at home! Soon, I found some other nice features such as scrolling input on text, NOMADS, and a simple RAD toolkit, awesome! Some useful file handling capabilities, and Linkfiles, what a terrific idea!

When I started to compare both languages (yes, hateful, but necessary comparisons), the limitations of the other Business BASIC language kept coming to the forefront, and comments like "Why didn’t they do this like ProvideX?" started to come across my mind more and more frequently. At that time, I didn’t know if the new language on the block would be strong enough to compete against our full-featured, mature language. Time would have to tell us. Well, the time has told us, and I’m still with ProvideX!