VB Cross-plataforms

This article is about what I think about Visual Basic...

I started programming when I was 8 years old in basic in an Atari computer. Then I programmed in QBasic, GWBasic and some other flavors... Then, I met Visual Basic 3.0 (around 1993?) and I really felt exited to use it. Programming was never that easy and fascinating. I follwed VB4, VB5 and I bought VB6 even before it was released officially. I used VB6 many years (still using it) and every system I did I discovered more and more about it. Then, programming in ASP (with VB script) was a logical step and it was amazing how easy was to create dinamic content. All this fascination ended when I was introduced into PHP, Javascript and then Java, and when I started to use Linux as my main OS. Obviously, knowing VB was not very useful to create applications in Linux, VBscript was IE only oriented language, and ASP was not as good as PHP.

I personally disliked the "only for IE" or "only for Windows" tags in the systems. Why force a user to use a determinate OS or browser in order to work?

For that reason, if I can avoid producing in VB, I prefer to do it (despite my experience in VB). Some days ago, I heard of Real Basic, I saw some demos and I really bet for it. You can develop in one plataform and compile for other plataforms natively (Windows, Mac, Linux), without having to modify your code and without having to install any other software (at least is what they say). Comparing to  Java applications, Real Basic applications are supossed to have a better performance.

If I have to develop a desktop system in the future, I will definitely give it a try. Mean while, I will continue developing in Php and Java if possible.