Creeping Elegance

[TerryRitchie]

"Bloat" and "Creeping Elegance" and other such terms are all just elitest gobbledygook.  It's a way of saying, "Hey, I personally don't need X feature, so it's a waste to include it in the language!"

Ever since QB64 hit its first major milestone and was able to compile QB45 code on a modern OS, people have been complaining over how the language has "bloated" out of control ever since.    We don't *need* extra math commands!  We don't need extra image formats, or extra sound capabilities!  32-bit screens are overrated -- QB45 didn't have them, and they're just bloat added into the language!  MEM wasn't needed -- it's just bloat!  Bit shifting?  Bit rotating?  Bloat!  File compression?  Bloat!

I've heard it all in the last ten years of working on the project here.  People object to adding *anything* new, as it might add 0.02kb to the size of their compiled EXE -- and that's BLOAT!

A language without any new development is a dead language.  If all one needs is QB45 capability, then just use QB45 and Dosbox.  Personally, there's a zillion things I'd like to see added to the language -- but according to some people, it'd all be unnecessary bloat!

Personally, I'd like to see:
Video support -- it'd be nice to have a _VideoPlay command where avi, mp4 and mkv files could play and run in.
Unicode support.  It's currently a PITA to type and input foreign characters in a program.  I'd love to see utf8 support added.
Speech to text added.
Text to Speech added.
HTTPS support added.
OCR added.
JSDN support.
SQL support.
Along with a zillion other things...

But each time one of these things might be worked on or added, someone pops up and starts complaining over bloat.  "I don't need this and it's just adding to the complexity of the language and the size of the files we're creating!!"

Which seems rather selfish to me, as there's a dozen other people who would like to easily be able to just call a keyword and have such functionality at their beck and call.

What one guy calls "bloat", another calls an "essential tool".

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The only real solution is to just strip everything out and make it all independent libraries which you then have to specify for use with your program.

Code: (Select All)

$USE: Screen
$USE: _NewImage
$USE: Print
$USE: Color
$USE: End

Screen _NewImage(640,480,32)
Color &HFFFF0000
Print "Hello World" 
End

With the above, we have the $USE command which we can make use of and only add those elements into our program that we actually make use of.  Bloat is now gone, but dang if the complexity of coding hasn't suddenly gotten a lot more complicated!!

I'm all for new keywords and features added to the language. My main computer (which is 6 years old now) has plenty of power for anything added to the language. My point being that so what if the compiled size of the code gets a little bigger with each additional feature? Computers only get faster and new QB64 features can take advantage of that. If someone wants less "bloat" they can always fork the project and remove it. The use of a metacommand would be a terrible idea.

_VideoPlay - Hell yes!
HTTPS - Oh yeah!