Choosing an alternative ( visual basic) high level programming language

Question

I used to be visual basic 6 programmer, i was pleased with visual basic : it is high level language that do stuff fast,easy to learn, easy to do stuff in,you can drag and drop stuff to the form and write your code,it is simply amazing.however microsoft buried VB6 and pointed us to VB.NET which is so different that it is not the old VB anymore.I didn't like what microsoft did and would like to look somewhere AWAY from microsoft and from any other proprietary language .

I would like to look into a similar language that is easy,cross platform (windows / Linux), object oriented, visual design, non proprietary and compile (for some guarding against reverse engineering).

i am freelancer so the choice is entirely mine,i don't care about performance of programs, the time taken to develop a given programs is much more important. desktop / database / GUI /networking programming is what i am looking for.

so any such language offered by our open source community ?

thank you so much

Answer 1

With those requirements I'd look at Java. As far as I understand it's open source now.

Answer 2

There are not too many platform independent object oriented languages that do compile but are not as complex like C++ or D.

You should try it with Java and not to keep care whether it can be reverse engineered or not. Most programs codes are practically not usable without commentaries. And if you need, you can still try using some kind of a code obfuscator.

Answer 3

Java will work but I strongly recommend looking into Python. Like Java it runs on a VM but has what most consider a far more readable syntax and will tie in with much of what's on the net (google apps, linux installers etc).

Answer 4

Go to any web environment. Try to use some technology like Java Server Pages, PHP, Adobe Flex. Unfortunately, these three suggestions, two are quite heavy (Java and Adobe Flex). However, you will find many things on the internet. Good studies.

Answer 5

First the disclaimer: I'm biased as I'm a java developer. Assuming you want rapid development of GUI applications, you could try GWT in combination with Java. GWT is a pretty good library to create desktop-like applications that run from within your browser.

You could use a graphical UI designer like GWT Designer or Extjs-designer I must say I haven't tried both tools extensively but they look pretty good.

Alternatively you could look at frameworks such as JSF 2.0 (Java Server Faces) in combination with richfaces. JBoss has a graphical designer. I've used JSF/facelets / Richfaces for a year and after a while I got pretty productive with that tools in creating frontend applications.

Last but not least, why not try C# ? That's .net alright, but quite a good language. It'll be slightly more familiar and allows you to create .net desktop applications. I know quite a lot of people who're quite productive and happy with C#.

Answer 6

I don't believe that there is any language/framework that fits your bill. (Easy/Similar to VB, object oriented, non proprietary, visual design, compiled).

Here are some possibilities of Languages/GUI toolkit (with IDEs) that at least fit the "visual design" and "not proprietary" parts:

• NOT cross-platform (Linux only): Gambas - it also has tools to help convert VB programs to gambas. Never used it though.
• NOT similar to VB: C++/Qt (with QtDevelop); Java/Swing (with Netbeans); C#/GTK# (with MonoDevelop); Python/WxWidgets (with BoaConstructor or PythonCard).

Answer 7

Two alternatives which are very close to what the poster wanted are : RealBasic and Jade

Answer 8

Try kbasic http://www.kbasic.com