User: reinz

Consider Smalltalk

On: Where Do You Go After Visual Basic?

There are a couple of cross-platform Smalltalk versions available.
Smalltalk is very RAD; it's a pure object oriented language + IDE which does away with those quaint source files. In general the GUI code is not transportable across vendors. Domain code is allmost cross-platform, often porting between vendors is trivial.

Some cross platform Smalltalk versions are Visual Age Smalltalk by IBM (needs to rebuild the app for each platform, uses native widgets) and VisualWorks by Cincom (binary portable, uses emulated widgets).
Both have a code revision system, IBM has ENVY as an option, VisualWorks comes with STORE.

More Smalltalk info at WhySmalltalk

Netscape 4 shows it's gopher heritage

On: Bring Back Gopher Campaign

Browse to a local directory with your netscape and have a look at the source of that page. You'll see stuff like

<A HREF="/bin/"><IMG ALIGN=absbottom BORDER=0 SRC="internal-gopher-menu"> bin/</A>

Smalltalk

On: Microsoft Is Indoctrinating Children, Shouldn't We?

Smalltalk - it was originally built for kids.

And it's used in those situations where other development environments fail to manage complexity.

Alan Kay ('I invented the term Object Oriented') gives a nice demonstration of Squeak Smalltalk from a child's perspective in his famous talk The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet; spool forward to minute 48 for the Squeak demo.

For Smalltalk info start browsing at www.smalltalk.org.