PureBasic is a modern BASIC programming language.

This appears to have all the elements needed:

1. An easy to use programming language
2. An integrated GUI IDE

Hower, at $190NZ not as good a value as others.

This gets put on the “maybe” list.

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted programming language created by Larry Wall in 1987, originally designed for text processing and report generation.

Over the years, it has evolved into a feature-rich language supporting both procedural and object-oriented paradigms, with strong capabilities in regular expressions, file handling, and system administration tasks.

It is cross-platform, running on Windows, macOS, and UNIX variants, and is open-source under the Artistic License or GNU GPL. Perl draws syntax and concepts from C, making it familiar to developers with prior experience in these languages.

Like Python and Lua, this is a command line program. Any GUI IDE is going to be tacked on.

Lua is a dynamically typed programming language created in Brazil in the early 1990s.

It is designed to be embedded inside larger applications, giving developers a flexible way to add scripting, configuration, or automation without heavy overhead. Because of its compact design and fast interpreter, Lua is widely used in games, networking tools, IOT devices, and applications that need a customizable runtime.

The games it’s listed in include:

Angry Birds – Uses Lua for physics, logic, and game flow.
World of Warcraft – Uses Lua for UI customization and add‑ons.
Factorio – Listed among Lua‑scripted games.
Grim Fandango – Early example showing Lua’s power in game development.

While the language is easily read, it is best for embedded use. All you get is a command line interface. And while there are GUI widgets it could use, this is nowhere near an integrated GUI development programming language.

This appears to be the world’s favorite programming language. and there are GUI extensions for it. Using visual studio with TKinter I managed to get a basic window and button up and running.

But finding a GUI IDE proved difficult. There are many. Some are web based, some just want your money and have very messy web pages. Some throw a lot of technical jargon at you.

But in the end I failed to find one product that integrated a code editor and GUI editor in an integrated environment I even managed to watch one video extoling the virtues of a WYSIWYG program then did not show the product but spent most of the time in VS Code.

As far as I (and Google AI) can work out, all these tools can create a GIU, but then you drop the code into python code and running it. There is no integration, modifying the code of the GUI means re-integrating them each time.

So much for the snake…

This is the first alternative to Delphi.

Lazarus is an (IDE) with Pascal that has a remarkable similarity to Delphi. Everything is present and feel familiar. Unfortunately I could not get this to work in dark mode. There is a theme you can install. But I can’t get it to work.

Back in the 1990, my first PC was a second-hand machine with a dual boot.

On one side, a new Windows 3. The other has OS/2. After switching between the two for a few months, I found OS/2 to be the better operating system.

As part of the deal you got Rexx (restructured extended executor) developed at IBM by Mike Cowlishaw in 1979. I learned to use it, having previous experience with Fortran and Basic. The language is easy to understand and use. And with Hockware VisPro/Rexx (1996).

you could make event driven GUI programs. Over time, this proved to be the best IDE (Integrated Development Environment) I would ever use.

Unfortunately, due to a lot of mismanagemet at IBM and Microsoft OS/2 faded and left before the century ended.

Eventually I changed PC and got Windows (7?). Fortunately, there was a port of Rexx I could use, Regina Rexx. with this, old programs could be ported to the new PC.

But what to use for GUI programs…
Eventually I used Borland Delphi Borland (Pascal)

Borland spun off its development tools into CodeGear in 2006, which was acquired by Embarcadero Technologies in 2008. Embarcadero releases the product, but at continues to develop and sell modern releases of the platform today.
But at a starting price of $3,000 for Delphi 13 it is clearly not for the hobbyist market.

So what is the modern alternative.
After 30 years of programming progress there must be something like VisPro/Rexx.

BUT I have a few criteria

1. It must work in Dark Mode (or emulate it)
2. It should have an active user base in 2026.

At last, after billions spent on AI by Microsoft there is a result for everyone…..

No, not that one but an alternative to Excel….

Tested, it proved to be more than adequate for my minimal spreadsheet requirements – store some data and do some calcs.

Bye Bye Excel.

Randal L. Schwartz (1961-11-22+)

Back in the 1990s, working in Atari ST Basic I came up with a way to sort a table of records and fields where they are in a text file with special characters seperating the fields.

Name@Address#Phonenumber<19740729>
Where @, # and < seperate the fields.

Sorting by name is easy, just use the program function to do it.
But sorting by age is different, as the date begins at various locations.

To fix this was a three part process.

1. Put the field to be sorted at the front.
2. Sort the array
3. Remove the front part

While I came up with this myself, I always assumed it was not original and probably dated back to the beginning of the computer age.

Turns out that this technique originated in the Perl programming community and was first described by Randal L. Schwartz in a December 16, 1994, Usenet post responding to a query about sorting filenames by their extension in the comp.unix.shell newsgroup. The name “Schwartzian transform” was coined by Bennett Todd in August 1995.

It is also known as ‘Decorate-Sort-Undecorate’