If you owned a home computer in the 1980s, you are probably familiar with the Basic programming language. Basic survived into the age of the Windows PC; however, the language was never as popular on Linux, which comes with several powerful alternatives. Projects such as HBasic [1] or wxBasic [2] showed much promise but didn't survive for long in the wild. KBasic [3], which was originally designed to provide a Basic environment for KDE, still exists as a commercial program for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. RealBasic is another commercial, closed source development environment for Linux, Windows, and the Mac OS.

One free alternative for Basic in Linux, Gambas [4], has continued to gain ground in the past few years and has gathered quite a large developer community. Designed as an integrated development environment, Gambas helps developers write programs with a graphical user interface. It supports the deployment of Gtk+ [5] (the underpinnings for Gnome, and XFCE) and Qt [6] (the basis for KDE). Gambas currently supports Qt 3, but not the more recent Qt 4. The IDE runs on Linux only, and the roadmap does not currently include ports to other operating systems.

The developers place much emphasis on making sure no one sees Gambas as a Microsoft Visual Basic clone, from which it differs in various details. However, if you have previous knowledge of Visual Basic, you should have no difficulty finding your way around Gambas – especially considering the documentation explains the differences between the two languages.

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