Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

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themodelplumber

Lazarus is really nice.

In BASIC land, the QB64pe project has a maintainer for Inform-pe, a pretty straightforward drag & drop interface builder:

https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1311

Here's an example running under QB64 (though not Phoenix Edition/pe):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9pNGBaIr94

Background on the Phoenix Edition:

https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=259

There's also Purebasic and Gambas, though Gambas isn't cross-platform...

https://www.purebasic.com/

https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

Zooming further out you have e.g. Defold and Cerberus X, which I'm not sure about the drag & drop but GUIs are certainly doable.

https://defold.com/

https://www.cerberus-x.com/community/index.php?pages/about/

Then there are Wonkey and wxBasic...

https://wonkey-coders.github.io/

https://www.wxbasic.net/

Et cetera... :-)

Personally I'm pretty fascinated by the way these projects typically center around a traditional forum, with various software structures in place that shape the user experience.

For example, prolific library authors may be invited to publish directly to their own subforum and kind of use it as their own website, etc.

When new projects start, spin off, fork, etc, the forum is often the first part of the user experience to see created, frameworked and decorated in depth.

The traditional forum model is mostly a strength but has some drawbacks, strength is that you have a treasure trove of searchable knowledge and if you ask a question to the dedicated community you have high change to get a helpful reply, because almost everyone using that language is on that forum.

The drawback is that there is usually relatively little information outside of the forum and uncommon that code is shared on things like github, instead code sharing is typically done by copy&paste on the forum, which makes it a bit harder to track and standardize conventions.

How do you actually find decent documentation for Lazarus though?

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Documentation

https://www.blaisepascalmagazine.eu/product-tag/lazarus-book...

Decent is really subjective, so maybe a good starting point is to give an actual example or specification of what you're looking for.

One advantage of this particular coding ecosystem is that you can use Delphi docs, techniques and tutorials as well, which can be helpful to know.

But if your specification is "cover all aspects of Lazarus itself at confirmed 1:1 functionality with the current major version" then it might be a difficult ask.

There are some really great resources out there, but they are not going to meet every definition of decent docs.

For me it was enough to watch some YouTube tutorials[1] to get the gist, identify some idiomatic workflows, start building, do a bit of searching in different documentation resources, and ask follow-up questions at the forum.

It's nice that we can also ask ChatGPT for help these days too.

1. I thought this was a good example of a set of YouTube tutorials demonstrating working with Lazarus: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYT8oqHJjWzTsIzzGN-Y1wKM9...

Youtube does not count in my opinion.

What I've often found was documentation for Delphi. There are many cases where they work just the same.

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