AutoHotkey Community

Can Autohotkey do anything that a BASIC programming language can do?

you mean VBA / NET , I have no experience
I just knew GWBASIC, was to silly to work with VBA to create msgbox hello world
then found autohotkey was very happy to have a nice GUI and the same ideas I used with gwbasic/DOS can create also (and much more)
to the old gwbasic programs which I was to lazy to convert I made a new surface with ahk (gwbasic calculates in background hidden)

Of course AHK is better than any BASIC. But if you ask in a BASIC forum, you would get another answer, so: Try AHKs features!

_________________
COMPLETELY INACTIVE - I do not use AHK anymore.

My personal feeling is that AHK is way better than any other
programming language. So far there hasn't been one problem
that I couldn't solve with AHK, while in the out-of-AHK programming
world I have collected a whole backlog of mysteries that still
remain unaccounted for.

they are both a shell,a identifier.
like pen and pencil. The point is what picture you want to draw !
However I think AHK is more easy and master

_________________
Fantasy OnLine

AHK is not a programming language, and as a programming lanugae it is really bad. The good thinks are the features and how easy it is to do simple hotkey or hotstring mappings. Against most programming languages, AHK is designed mostly to automate tasks, like in a GUI. Today AHK is more than that.

My answer is, if you want to write real programs, you should switch to BASIC or any other real programming language. I would say, try both and read the manuals and tutorials and come back to this place and report us why you choosed by yourself which language.

AutoHotkey was never intended to be a "real" programming language. It is however powerful enough to create "real" Windows programs, relatively easily.

There are compilers that use BASIC that are very powerful, comparable to or better than AHK.

If you want to learn programming, you are better off taking a look at OOP (too), something like JavaScript (multi-platform) first, or have a look at a BASICish language like VBA (most BASICish languages are PC centered though), because both are much used, and introduce you better to "clean" programming than the forgiving AutoHotkey does (it's strength is it's weakness here, or at least in the eye of the "programmers").

After that you could try Java (multi-platform, used a lot too), or if you are serious: learn C/C++ (multi-platform, everybody uses this). Finally: if you know Assembly (multi-platform in essence, but not too many know how to use this), you can call yourself a programmer.

If you know these, you should have no problem with other languages you might encounter.

IMNSHO (but not a programmer myself)

i don't care how ahk would be called but why isn't?
it's just matter of abstraction imo.
every programming languages are abstractions of machine code.
so we call programming languages that are similar to machine code as low-level language
by contrast, more abstracted languages are being called as (very) high-level languages
so i just would like to assort ahk as most high level language

No! It's basic. I wish it was green but had the same rules.

Different languages exist because people have different tastes. Virtually every language can do anything now, if not with conventional methods through invoking other processes, DLL calling etc. Therefore it depends on what you find most suitable.