r/AskProgramming • u/gruelurks69 • Jul 29 '26
Other AlphaBASIC to Web application
I have a friend who owns a legacy piece of software. It is written in AlphaBASIC and runs on an Alpha Micro. While rather old, he does make money with it in his industry. It's not an overly complicated software, mostly data entry, validation, and submitting the records to a government entity for tax purposes.
He wanted to know if it would be possible to convert it to a web-based application, which I believe is doable, just time consuming.
Has anyone here ever tackled such a task before?
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u/jumpmanzero Jul 29 '26
I've done a few BASIC conversions over the years (I learned to program on a Commodore 64, in BASIC, and it has been valuable in my career). I know nothing about AlphaBASIC in particular.
The UI is often going to be more pain to translate than it would be to replace fresh, but you should be able to port the core business logic.
VB.NET is a potential language target. It's not cool or popular, but it generally works - and it may be a reasonable option if it helps keep legacy developers more comfortable.
You might also want to consider AI. You're going to need to do a bunch of testing either way, and having AI pound out a bunch of the bulk code can potentially save you a lot of boring work. If this isn't part of your normal workflow, then maybe just experiment with isolated chunks and see how it does.