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Show HN: Objo Studio (objo.dev)
4 points by garrypettet 40 days ago
Objo Studio is a new development environment for building desktop and command line apps. It has a visual designer, a debugger, a compiler, and a modern BASIC-like language called ObjoBasic. The aim is simple: make it enjoyable to build real applications for macOS, Windows and Linux and learn how to program.

I've been working on Objo Studio in one shape or another since about 2019. I've always loved tools that let you move quickly from idea to working prototype and that abstract a lot of complexity and get out of your way. This has been tried before (VisualBasic, Xojo, etc) but have either been abandoned, become expensive or lost focus on hobbyists.

The whole stack is written in C#. There's a custom stack-based VM that is roughly on-par with Python for speed but this is not a high performance tool. It's an all-in-one IDE for visually developing cross-platform desktop apps. It tries to make it simple for users, abstracting runtimes and libraries to help newcomers learn but also let them thrive.

Yes I know lots of people think writing code is dead and we should all just vibe code everything but I think the world still needs programmers and I'd like to make it easier for newcomers and young people to learn the concepts of programming.

You can use Objo Studio for free forever if you just run locally. There's a fairly priced license to publish apps to run on other computers. It's free for education always.

Feedback is very much welcome. Be gentle, I'm a radiologist by profession!

1 comments

A radiologist who just happens to build some very impressive stuff, and not just Objo.

Like you, I want to see approachable tools for people who want to explore coding (with or without the aid of LLMs, but certainly seeking to understand how to write their own code). And other such tools in this space often are suffering from various levels of neglect and malpractice. This looks like a great start, on something that fills a real need -- at least to those of us who cut our teeth on things like Visual Basic 6, dBase/xBase, and similar. Beginner environment, yet not a toy.