Nothing I've used since has the same level of rapid prototyping and development VB6 made possible with its GUI. Debugging as well was a breeze. VB's inherited commands of string manipulation made possible a lot of niche parsing/conversion utilities I wrote for companies.
I think Netbeans/Java/Swing comes very close. It's still very much alive and actively developed. Bring in the IntelliJ IDE themes and it's full steam ahead no-bullshit development of cross-platform beauty.
I am not a Pascal developer, but Lazarus + Free Pascal >>>>>>>>> Netbeans and Java. Seriously. Java looks like a turd everywhere and it's laggy and slow even on a mid range machine.
On older ones like my Celeron the lag on menues it's noticeable.
Also, modern Free Pascal has OOP classes and methods if you like these.
If you run software made in Free Pascal like Cartes Du Ciel and them some Java one like Sweet Home 3D, the first one will run circles on snappiness and speed over the second one.
IDK how Java can be appreciated, most of its desktop software runs far worse than AMSN over TCL/TK in early/mid 00's under an Athlon.
Well, many people do not seem to know that and associate Pascal with whatever they were taught in the university (assuming they were taught about it at all and their knowledge doesn't stop at "Pascal = Old = like COBOL Old = Bad" :-P). I remember a friend of mine whom i hadn't seen for years laughing when i mentioned i used Free Pascal and asking if it even has objects (in that order). He was just joking, but people can have a lot of assumptions about languages like Pascal that tend to have been around for a long time and have a lot of dialects :-).
FWIW AFAIK Free Pascal got its OOP stuff from Delphi (almost, but that is historical details) which in turn is an extension to Turbo Pascal's OOP stuff introduced in TP5.5 which in turn was based on Apple's Object Pascal extensions that (AFAIK) were designed with Niklaus Wirth's help during the late 80s. The OOP functionality Free Pascal has and mainly uses started with Delphi 1 though (which already had things like properties and reflection - this is how the form designer worked) in 1995.
Of course i wouldn't call those modern any more than i'd call structured programming elements like 'procedure' and 'while' modern in 1995 :-P.
"Beauty" it not a word I've ever heard associated with Java GUIs before. From browsing screenshots Swing looks to me like non-native 1990s clunkiness. Am I missing something?
How do you "bring in the IntelliJ IDE themes" in a Swing application? The default theme [1] is distinctly lacking in beauty – not because it's not modern, or because it doesn't have animations, or because it's not native, but because of things like (for example):
1. the inconsistent padding around the focus rectangle (which even touches the outer border on one side!) on that toolbar button to the left in the screenshot,
2. that whoever redesigned the Metal theme some years ago decided to make the selected tab visually connect to the content by using the same background color (good idea, by itself) but apparently didn't notice that every application wraps the content in a widget that draws its own background, resulting in what you see on the screenshot: the tab color continuing for a few pixels into the content and then awkwardly bumping up against the content's background without a border.
Also, IntelliJ IDEA has to implement its own menu bar because Swing's built-in one can't do submenus properly.
