In fact, when you look at the specs for QBASIC64 then it's a little less impressive than first made out. It also makes me wander why he didn't just learn VB anyway (as the libraries in QBASIC64 would have required additional learning anyway). Even VB classic would have made more sense.
Anyhow, this at least reminds the language elitists that a language is only as powerful as the developer who's wielding it.
Doing anything useful in QBasic was such a major pain; from what I recall, to use the mouse(which wasn't supported), you needed to write an assembly procedure byte by byte, do a CALL ABSOLUTE to jump into that procedure and re-read the cursor position from memory.
Also, VB is pretty GUI and event-centric. QBasic is a pretty good local maximum of being quite expressive while still being a strictly procedural language.
VB.NET does compile to other platforms via the Mono framework. In fact Mono is actually available for more platforms than QB64 is.
Classic VB is Windows only AFAIK though I've had a 100% success rate with VB under WINE. But suggesting VB6 was pretty dumb on my part anyway; aside scripting variants (eg VBA), it's a pretty much a dead language.
> Also, VB is pretty GUI and event-centric. QBasic is a pretty good local maximum of being quite expressive while still being a strictly procedural language.
VB.NET supports procedural CLI apps. But if you could equally write an OpenGL / DirectX game procedurally if you wanted (events are there to be used, but you don't have to create event handlers). However I don't really see the point in wanting to avoid using events; he's using a mouse, so it makes sense to have a mouse click event. The code would be a lot cleaner and the interface more responsive than having a looped procedure checking for mouse button states (believe me, I've had to do both - and the one thing I don't miss from writing DOS GUIs in Pascal was having to create a psudo-event wrapper to handle input devices).