Recommend me an easy programming environment for Windows

In My Humble Opinion
1

I want to start writing simple .exe programs to run under Windows. I want to be able to give little programs to coworkers, preferably without a lot of baggage, preferably without some fancy “installation wizard”.

I’ve done a lot of casual programming in Algol, APL, PL1, Fortran, BASIC, C, Scheme, and much more Forth than anything else. And also SAS and the scripting languages with Fluent and GAmbit and FlexPDE (all FEM/PDE systems). I enjoy making things work, and generally do - often on the first attempt. But all these were for cpm or dos machines, text interface, or else code that runs within an application that does its own window manipulations. Nobody wants to use simple utilities that aren’t natively Windows, or have the Windows user interface.

I tried SwiftForth, which is a professional development package, and did write a couple silly little things, using Petzold’s book as a guide - but SwiftForth teaches people who already write for Windows how to use Forth, and I wanted the other way 'round. It seemed like there were 200 things to keep simultaneously in mind in order not to crash - such a burden.

I also dabbled in C for Windows (Borland’s), but the overhead of understanding all the Windows details and pitfalls was just so oppressive - and I don’t like C much anyway.

We’re not talking about fancy programs here, not interfacing directly with other applications, not using much graphics. I’m a scientist, not a programmer, and I want to be able to create my own simple programs for scientific purposes.

So, Visual Basic? RealBasic? LabView, which I was thinking of learning anyway for other reasons? Or are these no easier than C and SwiftForth?

Is there a way into this that isn’t too painful?

2

It depends on what you’re trying to do. If you just care about throwing together a simple GUI to do some stuff, then yeah, Visual Basic is pretty painless. But if you need to analyze large amounts of experimental data, then C/C++ are the way to go.

3

I suppose you could use VB Script. I’m not sure what version of Windows you have, but on XP VB Script is built right in, no need to download or install anything.

4

Whenever I want to throw together a quick program with a Windows GUI, I fire up Borland Delphi.

5

Take a look at PowerBASIC. I use their Compiler for Windows whenever I need to write a Windows app quickly from scratch. The compiler produces very fast, compact code, without requiring run-time modules, other dependencies, or installation wizards. It can make standard EXEs or DLLs, has a serviceable inline assembler, and I’ve had no problems interfacing to other programs and libraries written in C/C++ etc (including the Windows API, of course). The learning curve is pretty quick, although perhaps not quite as quick as for Visual Basic (which I no longer use since I hate its bloated nature). With your background you could be writing procedural code within a few minutes, although dealing with dialogs and callbacks takes a little longer to master. There’s an add-on visual design tool (PowerBASIC Forms) which can speed up GUI design, but it’s certainly not necessary to get started.

Unfortunately the PowerBASIC compiler is not dirt cheap at $199, but it’s still a lot less than a new copy of Delphi ($1090 for a new user) and a lot more powerful than VBScript. PowerBASIC offers a 30-day money-back policy if you buy it from them for shipment via mail (i.e. not via download). I’ve recommended it to a few friends, none of whom have sent theirs back for a refund, so I guess that’s an indication of something!

I’ve found their Peer Support Forums to be very valuable. The compiler developers post frequently, and requests for new features are taken seriously and often appear in the next release.

[Disclaimer: Other than as a customer, I have no affiliation with PowerBASIC.]

6

Thanks, all. It sounds like the VB plan would work, and like there’s a cleaner alternative too.

Depends what I want to do? Well, typically my programs would do something technical in the physical sciences or engineering, but not something very complicated - for that I would tend to use SAS, which many of us already have, or something even more specialized for FEM work.

PowerBasic looks very interesting. I really hate things like “run-time modules, other dependencies, or installation wizards” - I want to be able to give someone one .exe file that runs as it is, and works on anything more recent than Win95.

VBScript is built into XP? How do I find it? I ran Help on vbscript and found several mentions but no “start here” leads. And is it a scripting language like some sort of a job control language, or is it more general purpose? I’ve written some DOS batch files, and gather they can do all sorts of fancy things but never done much with that (it looked sort of klunky). Is this going to be the new batch file?

7

There is a free IDE for writing C# programs. It is called Sharp Develop. You might give it a shot. It is not nearly as hard as C for Windows.

8

I recommend Python. It’s free, it’s been quite successful and since you already have some programming experience you’ll pick it up very quickly. There are lots of external modules to do pretty much everything you might like, from game development to GUI to databases. In addition to that, it is portable to other operating systems, so you can pass your program to people with MacOS X, Unix or whatever.

Or you could try Perl, and it’s arguably a little bit easier to start, while having many of the same advantages of Python (but I prefer Python more those days).

9

I’m not a real VB Script expert, but I know there are some that visit SDMB. VB Script is just a watered down VB, I’m not sure what all the differences are. On your Windows system, do a “Help” and for the search argument use “Script”. My XP system supports VB Script, JavaScript and WSF. You can find tons of examples on the web for VB Script and JavaScript.

I never heard of WSF until about twenty seconds ago: