Cross-platform IDE for cross-platform high-level language with easy GUI creation (to replace VB .NET)
Question: Suppose that you wish to show somebody who is not familiar with any
programming language and he/she will (probably) not be involved in
professional programming, some basics concepts: you would like to provide idea
of loops, conditional statements and allow to create few simple programs with
good-looking GUI.

For that purpose, I found Visual Studio with Visual Basic (or C#) as a quite
good solution. It allows to simply drag and drops some objects to form, easily
set their preferences and with IntelliSense easily program events.

However, I see some quite important drawbacks. First of all, it is only for
Windows (okay, I know about Visual Studio Code, but it doesn't support easy
GUI designing). I tested also that trying to open even very simple project in
Monodevelop under Linux is not smooth process (VS adds some references not
needed in Mono). Secondly, VS environment is extremely huge for somebody who
is going to create simple window application.

If this is possible, I would like to replace current IDE and redesign course.
Personally I like Python, but any other high-level language is okay for me. I
would like to avoid lower-level languages (for example C) since I wish to
present everything as simple as possible (and correct me if I'm wrong, but
creating GUI in ANSI C is always tricky).

I am not aware of any cross-platform IDE which allows to do everything (GUI
visual designing + coding + setting project properties) in one application
like VS. For example, you design GUI in [Qt
Designer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5313/cross-platform-language-
agnostic-gui-markup-language), but write code in pyCharm, Eclipse (with Python
plugin) or Geany. [Ninja IDE](http://www.ninja-ide.org/home/) looks very
visually attractive. This might be my choice, but I don't see any GUI designer
here.

Could you tell me what are your thoughts about right tool, please?

I am fully aware that by asking this question, I'm risking closing it and
marking as 'opinion-based'. However...hope that it will be not.


Answer: For cross-platform, you should have a look at Xojo (formerly CrossBasic,
RealBasic, RealStudio...). It's free to play with, but you can't compile or
deploy without a license. With a license, it allows compilation of Windows,
OSX, iOS, and Linux binaries from a single source. I did use RealStudio 7 for
a bit, it was alright really, no major complaints. Of course it will not be as
complete a framework as .NET or mono is, but what was there was plenty for
simple cross platform apps, certainly enough for beginners to chew on for a
while, while learning object-oriented programming. Apart from the cross
platform and size of VS though, Visual Studio is by far more complete and more
standard.

