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Open Source IDE GAMBAS Reaches 3.0
Kevin Fishburne writes "After years of work, creator Benoît Minisini and friends are just in time for New Year's celebrations with the first stable release of GAMBAS 3. Per their web site, 'Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, a bit like Visual Basic (but it is NOT a clone !).' GAMBAS is component-based, so check out the list for an idea of what you can do with it."
It's what I started my programming history with and I still have fond memories of it. Easy enough language that got me interested in programming and provided me instant fun. There never really was any other such comprehensive language with quick-to-see results. Drawing on screen was easy, syntax was easy and reading from input was easy. You got fun things done quickly. As much as some "I'm better than you" geeks like to take a stand about it, BASIC was important part of history.
Gambas is a great basic-esque ide for beginners and on any debian derivative is just an apt-get away. Of course use your respective repo tools elsewhere.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Like what? Visual Studio is by far the best IDE there is. It is almost outstandingly powerful and still lightweight with the newest versions. It's nice to work with. Apart from VisualAssist, which is great addon, there's not much there to improve over others. In fact, the assist features of VS is on par with others, VA just takes it step further. Anyone who would use Eclipse over VS just doesn't know what he is doing.
I don't understand why people think Eclipse is so awesome. I use it at work currently and when I get time, I'm going to switch away from it.
1. Eclipse is too modular. It can't do anything on it's own and the hundreds of plugins aren't tested with each other. This causes bugs, incompatibilities and UI integration problems.
2. Eclipse has gotten better, but it still suffers from the refresh problem. It doesn't poll for changes in source files frequently enough and if you dare add a file outside the IDE, you have to manually refresh the view to see it.
3. Eclipse wasn't written with swing and requires SWT which means that you can only run it on platforms that SWT has been ported on.
4. Eclipse is not intuitive. Things like wizards don't behave properly. When writing Java code, one would assume that Apache Axis 2 projects would be supported with the latest web project type. They're not. You can't switch without recreating your whole project. You also can't generate a client only from an axis 2 project.
5. Eclipse is ugly. It still looks like an IBM product. Intellij, Netbeans, hell even visual studio are more appealing.
6. Every "killer" feature I've seen an Eclipse developer mention is also available in Netbeans. The few things I can't do in Netbeans are third party add-ons that haven't been tested well and don't integrate. It turns into multiple eclipse installs.. one for Java, one for C++, one for PHP, etc. This is wrong. Netbeans got this right.
7. Source formatting in eclipse is terrible. It breaks things up into little tiny lines and wraps things way too much. Java is verbose.. i need more than 80 characters unfortunately to be legible. It's also a hassle to configure this compared to other IDEs I've seen. It's so bad, some people have made plugins just to do that.
8. Eclipse warnings are useless. People get so used to having yellow lines on the side, they don't take any warnings seriously. It causes one to do bad things.
I realize that this is going to start a flamewar, but before anyone tries to say I'm wrong please try some recent versions of other IDEs. Most complaints I hear about Netbeans, Visual Studio, etc. are for very old versions. If eclipse is the gold standard, our standards are too low.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Is it required that open source projects have cute characters? Mozilla's fox and other characters, Linux's Tux, BSD's devil, Freemind's butterfly, etc.
I understand "guerrilla marketing" but to whom are we marketing: prepubescent teenie boppers?
Not to slight the work he is doing, but has anyone used gambas in any 'real' projects? I have seen lots of toy/pet projects but noting major.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have found Qt Creator much easier to work with than Visual Studio. It requires some more explicit management in its project files (as they are just QMake projects), but I've found that I prefer this to the endless point-and-click mazes that VS subjects me to.
It's handy enough on its own for C/C++ projects, independent of whether you are using Qt or not, but it's extremely helpful for developing applications that use Qt as it integrates very well with Qt Designer.
Many developers that would code infinite circles aeound you know what they are doing.
Actually, in code, infinite loops tend to be a bad thing . . .
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
What? You use eclipse when you have the awesomeness of vim available to you? (okay, I admit it - I switched to jEdit recently, but still, for a lot of code, eclipse is massive overkill).
"Gold" is our 3rd-lowest level. Sort of like "Professional" - it's really for amateurs. You want AT LEAST Platinum. Or Onxy. Or even the craptastic Diamond level. That will give you the absolute minimum. And for our Enterprise-y customers, there's Prozilla, to Manhattan, and all the way up to Rushmore.
What do they mean? Who knows - it SOUNDS like it should cost more, and that's all that counts!
So don't knock goto - the software you're using depends on it.
I fully agree. Visual Studio is amazing, even for someone as "anti-Microsoft" as myself to admit it. Qt Creator is the closest thing I get to pure satisfaction when I code C++ without Visual Studio. It indents it right, it has great themes, great shortcuts, great everything!
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Does that include those who can't bring themselves to install VS? How is it lightwieght by the way? Last time I installed it took two hours.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Isn't this like Ford releasing a Model T for 2012?
Who cares about Basic in 2012?
No disrespect to anyone, I'm serious. Honest thought, not meant to offend.
Look at all the case: statements in a switch - they're all GOTOs (the case: is a label). So are your virtual method tables. The break; statement also does a goto to the next instruction after the enclosing set of statements (switch, for, whatever).
Uh, those are *not* gotos. GOTO is a statement
GOTO label
and nothing else[1]. switch, break, continue and run-time polymorphism may or may not have some problems in common with goto but there is no logic which says that if you accept one of them you must not criticise goto.
[1] Modulo variants WRT where the label is allowed to be: in the same function, anywhere in the same source file, and so on.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with GOTO, and it doesn't necessarily lead to spaghetti code, just like not using GOTO doesn't guarantee that your code won't be an ungodly mess. It's all up to the programmer.
In cases of languages such as javascript that don't have a goto, you can get most of the same flexibility by implementing a global STACK array, a global THIS, and a separate global FUNCS array, and pushing and popping objects (esp. your local equivalent of THIS) off the STACK and functions off FUNCS, and making the default operand always be the global THIS array. So, while you may not be able to GOTO, you can achieve the same convenience (and make your code a lot more generic in the process).