Open Source IDE GAMBAS Reaches 3.0 137
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."
Re:BASIC (Score:2, Interesting)
I've had a look at Gambas3 just now. You know what... it worked first time and was dead-fucking easy to get a gui running.
People knock Visual Basic for Applications (built into Excel/Word)... but so many quick and dirty applications get built with it because:
1. The component style of programming is extremely powerful - particularly when you can call upon very flexible and high level Office components. Especially when you have a good IDE - which VBA does.
2. It's shockingly easy to get your first application running (don't knock it... businesses run on the phrase "get it done now" - the first thing that works gets used).
3. You can give someone, for example, one MDB file and they click on it... and it runs (same with a spreadsheet). Easy to develop, easy to distribute.
Slag it off all you like. Microsoft does understand how to get people to use it. It's something that Free software developers never seem to learn. Maybe Gambas has?