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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xojo does it, but they are a long time commercial effort (RealBasic).
Xojo is a solid paid solution. I use it all the time.
In the same vein, we have Lazarus vs Delphi: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
In the same vein, we have Lazarus vs Delphi: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Would be good to have a cross platform version of this. I wonder how difficult it would be?
Xojo does it, but they are a long time commercial effort (RealBasic).
I gave it a try a few times but it never clicked. I felt constrained by the language (Lisp, Smalltalk and Forth ruined me for life) and the runtime is nothing to write home about. For most people I guess it doesn't matter. My friend doesn't even know what reference counting is and wants something simple to get stuff done.
This is fantastic. I've lamented the lack of a good GUI and environment for making desktop apps since VB 4, but it looks like they never went away. Gambas looks fantastic, and exactly as easy to develop with as I remember VB 4 being. I can't say I can stomach the language it uses, but something like this for Python would be a godsend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xojo does it, but they are a long time commercial effort (RealBasic).
Xojo is a solid paid solution. I use it all the time.
I looked at the site, this sounds interesting. Just interested in hearing it from someone who uses it
In the same vein, we have Lazarus vs Delphi: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/diffvb lists "Differences From Visual Basic" and says "Gambas is not intended to be a clone of Microsoft Visual Basic" and "you can't simply copy your VB projects over and expect them to compile under Gambas".
>Thankfully, in Gambas you cannot use GOTO to trap errors! Instead, use CATCH, FINALLY or TRY For error handling goto is generally much clearer than using exceptions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xojo does it, but they are a long time commercial effort (RealBasic).
A friend that runs a one man shop developing websites and native apps swears by it. He actually moved his new developments from Lazarus to Xojo and is always talking about the upcoming Xojo web 2.0. I gave it a try a few times but it never clicked. I felt constrained by the language (Lisp, Smalltalk and Forth ruined me for life) and the runtime is nothing to write home about. For most people I guess it doesn't matter…
Lazarus aside, it seems FOSS isn't going to give us the kind of RAD tools that one might hope for -- thinks more like Hypercard and related. Such efforts require the kind of resources (long periods of time and good funding, to start) that loose networks of casual contributors are never going to be able to provide. And in today's world, where next-quarter reporting and shareholder primacy dominate enterprise decisions, it's even rare to get something truly immersive and new from commercial entities (Apple is the biggest corp in the world. Do they have something like their ATG group from the 90s? If so, what the hell are they working on?)
> Lisp, Smalltalk and Forth ruined me for life)
Same here, but there's a (partial) reason these aren't really viable in today's computing culture. The first is that they really are for whole computing systems that don't necessarily make a distinction between user and programmer. The culture we have today is the opposite of this: users are consumers, first and foremost. Computing systems are thus mechanisms that run isolated "applications" whose ability to be modified by regular people is severely limited compared to what we know (and have known for 4 decades) is possible.