[albertzeyer]

Ok, this post is mostly about text-based IDEs, but I think the point mostly stands as well for IDEs in general. I'm thinking about Visual Basic or Delphi.

I think such a IDE for Python would really be helpful for beginners. Not text-based, but more like Visual Basic. But everything integrated, everything easily discoverable (that's very important!). Maybe also with such a GUI builder as in VB. And a built-in debugger. I think for the code editor, as long as it has some syntax highlighting and tab auto-complete, that would already be enough. But some easy code navigation would also be good. E.g. when you place some button on your window, and double click that button in the GUI editor, you get to the call handler code of that button.

Some time ago, a small group of people (me included) (I think from some similar HN post?) got together and we brainstormed a bit on how to implement this. But we got lost in the discussion around what GUI framework to base this on. I already forgot the options. I think we discussed about PySide, Dear PyGui, or similar. Or maybe also web-based. We couldn't really decide. And then we got distracted, and the discussion died off.

Note, Free Pascal was mentioned here. But then you should also mention Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/), which is the same as Free Pascal but cloning Delphi. Lazarus is really great. And it is actively developed. But Object Pascal is too little known nowadays, maybe also a bit outdated.

[mkl]

> I think such a IDE for Python would really be helpful for beginners. Not text-based, but more like Visual Basic. But everything integrated, everything easily discoverable (that's very important!). Maybe also with such a GUI builder as in VB. And a built-in debugger.

That was Boa Constructor, starting in 2000: https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/. It seemed good at the time, but never caught on.

[albertzeyer]

Oh, I just checked, there is an active fork: https://github.com/ianBBB/boa-constructor

[mamcx]

There was FoxPro too that was amazing and in some ways better than Delphi, in special for the integrate "command window" and the ability to show "widgets" at will (like BROWSE)

[cookiengineer]

To me, Lazarus is the golden standard of IDEs, because Lazarus is built in Lazarus and the author really knows how to dogfeed his own product. So many examples and tutorials, it's really awesome for teaching kids how to make programs.

I mean, it's really an IDE similar to what we were used to later with Microsoft Visual Studio, when it had integrated tagging, search, help, API docs, widget examples and libraries etc.

Every time someone tries to tell me what an IDE is, I say nope, that's not an IDE because nothing is integrated there. Xcode could be argued is an IDE (still) but it's a painful one in comparison with Lazarus.

But what do I know, I am so stubborn that I build my own UI frontend framework in Go for the last 6 months because I refuse to go back to the JS world. Hopefully at some point I can make an IDE with that, but who knows how much timd I need for that...

[jmmv]

> Ok, this post is mostly about text-based IDEs, but I think the point mostly stands as well for IDEs in general. I'm thinking about Visual Basic or Delphi.

Exactly. I recently recorded a video of me creating a toy app with VB3 on Windows 3.11 and the corresponding tweet went “viral” for similar reasons as this article.

It’s not really about the TUI: it’s about the integrated experience as you say!

[NetMageSCW]

If you are willing to forego the GUI development, LINQPad is an amazing interactive environment for creating libraries to help your scripting and then speed up the scripting of small tasks. It is fast and easy enough that I’ve used it for complicated processing of small (a few screens) of text instead of emacs, but powerful enough to run queries against phone systems or import GB of CSV and produce an Excel summary.