[neatcoder]

Wow! Can you share your story more? What does your application do? Why did you choose BASIC 35 years ago? Did the question about rewriting it another language come up anytime? How did such discussions go? Do you enjoy writing BASIC code?

[gushie]

I've been with the company 20 years so wasn't involved in the original decision. I believe the company started out on PDP's before moving to MicroVAX (and later Alpha and Integrity). BASIC will likely have been the best fit at the time. It is business software for the Agri industry, originally a terminal text entry system. Now we also have a web front end (running on Windows IIS, communicating to VMS/BASIC via Apache Tomcat/WSIT webservices). We did try converting to VB6 back when it was a thing, but then .NET happened so we abandoned it as conversion to VB.NET wasn't so straight forward. A rewrite in C# was briefly considered before finally going for the web front end/web services option to avoid rewriting the BASIC business/data layer. Sadly the application will go end of life in a couple of years, as we're now part of a larger corporation who have similar applications. Ours lost out due to the OpenVMS layer being a hard sell to new customers. I've never really thought about when I enjoy it! It's mostly a data entry / reporting application, so generally not very exciting :)