What language is good to write simple nice GUI apps?

Question

Hi,

I never did to much GUI programming (besides a bit of QT and Delphi).
I need to write simple GUI app which would interactively visualize graphs.
Very similar tool to "GraphViz GUI for Mac".

What would you suggest?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Consider Python with PyGTK: cross-platform, documented, proven.

Answer 2

I think it really depends on the platform that you're targeting. If you are writing native apps for the Mac, Objective-C is probably the best choice, as the APIs are built around that. If you're writing for Windows, you probably want C/C++ or C#, for the same reason. Cross-platform apps would make you choose a platform-neutral language, such as Java, or Python (as jldupont suggested).

Answer 3

JRuby is a good choice - it's cross platform, and you get the double benefit of a large number of components available for java (for instance, someone probably has done an interactive graph visualisation panel already) and the ability to connect and use them from ruby (which is a great language to program in).

Answer 4

I use quite a few and I'd say C# in Visual Studio on Windows (which is great, and free!), and something like C#+MonoDevelop (or equally a scripting language like Perl) and Glade/GTK on Linux/BSD/other UNIX's while on Mac OS then XCode and Interface Builder are the obvious choice.

I would say C# with Visual Studio Express is the easiest and XCode and Interface Builder have the steepest learning curve. I've not used QT though, so can't compare but imagine it's similar to GTK.

Thinking outside the box a little REALBasic is also excellent at getting the job done (if you can get past the fact that it's OO Basic). It's not free but they recently greatly reduce the price and it's really great to use for simple GUI app development.