Have you ever burned your hands by some new and immature technology?

Question

I often hear people saying you shouldn\'t rush into adopting new technologies until they have become stable, tried and tested. There is even a joke on how it takes 3 versions to

Answer 1

True Basic

In the mid-1980s we were looking for a development platform that would work on the various DOS implementations and not be as "bit-twiddling" a language as C was.

We found True Basic, advertised as having been created by the original creators of BASIC back in 1964. Here was a language that 'compiled' down to p-code. Not only would it run on DOS machines, it ran on GEM (Atari-ST) and Amiga boxes.

It had add-ons much like we were used to having with development environments on the VAX/VMS machines we used. Things like Forms packages, an "ISAM" add-on (before the days of callable databases on PCs), etc.

Unfortunately, the multi-platform abilities never sold the language enough. Heck, according to Wikipedia, there's a Mac OS version (though not OS X or Snow Leopard). I even found the 'current' TrueBasic page while writing this note.

Eventually Visual Basic 1.0 came out and all the BASIC programmer, like myself, checked it out since it had Microsoft's name on it. Now, of course, 10 versions later, we've been steered over to the .Net platform while TrueBasic sits at V5.5.