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."

BASIC

[InterestingFella]

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.

Re:BASIC

[gadzook33]

Yes, BASIC was great (for the role it played). VB is an abomination that should be wiped from the face of the earth. I mean really people, learn something that starts with 'C'.

Re:Ever heard of ECLIPSE ????

[laffer1]

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.

Windows?

[Osgeld]

Its the main reason I have never bothered with this, it looks like everything I would want except windows support ... which though I run linux on the desktop most of the world does not

Its really not in my interest to sit down and learn a whole new system if I have to toss it out of the window the second I'm on a MS OS

Re:Spaghetti code with gotos AND inheritance!

[tomhudson]

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).

So don't knock goto - the software you're using depends on it.

Re:need a good C++ IDE, though

[Jorl17]

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!