When talking with some people, the one thing I hear over and over is how you can't use REALbasic to do this, that or the other thing. Well, fine. Here's my rebuttal. Here's a list of products that are MwRB and are commercially very successful and cover a wide range of product types.
SlayFire (low-level)
SlayFire is a suite of optimizers for REALbasic applications that are written in 100% pure REALbasic code. The company is founded by Hank Marquis (whom you may have heard of before).
Cast::Stream (media)
The guys over at Caststream make a streaming audio/video product that's been used to stream the WWDC keynote, used by British Telecom, Adobe and even Minnesota's own Mayo Clinic. Again, MwRB and making plenty of cash.
ORBIT (enterprise business)
Of course, if you want to talk about money-makers then how about the treasury application written by Green River Computing? Want to know what software Nike and the US Treasury Dept use? Yeah... MwRB.
iccTools (internal business)
Then there's the REALbasic applications that live in the printing industry (which are used by the PW Group out of Regina, Saskatchewan). They use RB internally to reduce their costs and increase their profit margins by a decent amount. They also sell some of the MwRB applications commercially.
REAL Software (development tools)
You probably think this is just a plug for work... but it's NOT! For once. ;-) We use RB internally (obviously) to write things like our order system and bug base. But we use it for much more than that -- we're currently bootstrapping our product. That's right -- we're writing REALbasic in REALbasic right now. Even VisualBasic can't boast that kind of versatility or power.
So the next time I hear someone complaining to me that you can't make anything other than calculators and text editors using REALbasic, I will look them square in the eye and say "just because you aren't competent enough to do it doesn't mean others can't". Well, maybe I won't be that harsh.. but still. It's annoying to hear that the programming lanaguage I work on just isn't powerful enough. It all boils down to how good of a programmer you are. Poor programmers write poor software -- doesn't matter what language they use. Don't blame the tool.
I use REALbasic to write simulation programs to demonstrate aspects of visual perception or to model how the visual system works. I used to write such software in C++/assembly, but that code was not cross-platform (too much GUI code had to be changed to work on each platform) and less maintainable. I also can develop these programs in days rather than weeks or months!
Any tool that can let me write code quickly and run on multiple platforms is no toy!
That said, RB still needs more sophisticated programming tools, such as refactoring tools (not realistic unless IDE plug-ins are allowed with access to the syntax tree -- exporting XML, refactoring and reimporting is not a substitute), and more complete unit testing tools with mock objects. I'm hoping that either Real or SlayFire comes through with these.