Cheap Software Languages for NT?

JeanBaptiste writes: "I work for a small company that refuses to spend the money on visual studio. I need this (or some other language) to do my job (which isn't programming), and for about a year now I have had to use borland C++ 3.0 for dos to do the things that need doing. I know C/pascal/basic from years ago, but have not had to write any programs for work until recently. My question: Are there any cheap/free programming languages that will make a stable winNT/2000 app?" Well, there's ActiveState, which has perl, python, and assorted other packages and tools.

.NET

[mustapha]

You can download the .NET SDK for free. It comes with a C# compiler, debugger and documentation. Just use Emacs or anything else you like as your editor.

Consider Tcl/Tk

[maetenloch]

Take a look at Visual Tcl [sourceforge.net]. It allows you to build gui-based applications based around Tcl/Tk scripts. The best part is that it's free and it's platform independent.

Another solution is to look for a previous version of Visual Studio or Borland on Ebay. Also check on Yahoo, as sometimes Microsoft shuts down auctions of it's software on Ebay.

Truthfully, if your company is too cheap to buy you the tools you need, you have to wonder how serious they are about succeeding.

Re:Cheap, but not free (PowerBASIC)

[Katravax]

I want to second this. PowerBASIC is fantastic. It's about $150 or so for the Win32 GUI-mode compiler if you shop around (check Provantage), and it makes the tiniest, fastest executables I've seen, short of raw assembly. The user forums on the PowerBASIC site are also excellent, and you can get help on just about anything, with commented source code even.

It's got BASIC-like abstraction of dialogs, TCP/IP, file I/O, regex, and more. The source output is readable by pretty much any programmer. If you choose, you can also write your apps SDK-style rather than using the dialog-abstraction keywords.

Don't mistake it for a VB-alike. It supports all native Windows datatypes as well as pointers. I've written fairly GUI-intensive apps that do quite a bit of work (regexing, FTPing, SMTPing, and more) where the output file was less than 80K. Also, the output executable is a normal PE Windows exe, and has zero external runtimes.

It's the next best thing to raw assembly, with the ease of coding in BASIC. I'm also a faithful customer of PowerBASIC, and don't work for them.