liudr:
I totally agree with you that vs is good for the right job in the right hand. As a hobby programmer with almost 30 years of experience among various languages, I found most IDEs unnecessarily complicated for most people trying to learn a bit of programming just for fun. Even eclipse is pretty heavy. I want turbo C where you can type up a program and hit compile and run. Frankly how many people have projects longer than a couple hundred of lines and would benefit from a complex IDE? Not many on arduino forum. Think "learning curve". If you programmed professionally,even for three years, you would not like how arduino IDE looks like. But how many arduinoists are professional programmers?BTW, I hate typing on ipad. It is not fast enough for my type speed. I need a computer right now!!!
If you don't mind BASIC (of a QuickBASIC 4.5 variety) - check out QB64 (http://www.qb64.net/) - it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux (although Mac and Linux right now are a rev behind, which means that some of the commands for 'doze don't work in the Linux version - I keep hoping this is corrected soon). It comes with an IDE much like the original QuickBASIC 4.5 (and similarly, like the old DOS Turbo C and TurboBASIC IDEs), which was writting in QB64 (actually, QB64 is written in QB64 - the history of it is kinda fascinating - the guy behind it started building it using QuickBASIC 4.5, and bootstrapped it until it could compile itself!). It comes with full source code, too; technically it is open-source Freeware, built on top of various LGPL bits and pieces.
What it does is take QBasic 1.1 or QuickBASIC 4.5 code, and converts it to C/C++ - then it invokes a C/C++ compiler (gcc in Linux - not sure what it uses under Windows or Mac) to create a native executable that runs very, very fast. It has a ton of extra commands to allow you to take advantage of modern hardware for graphics, sound and other things (although this is proving to be an issue for the developer when it comes to Linux and Mac support - he's taking a while to get to the next rev in part due to trying to figure out how to handle library inclusion and port access for things like the serial ports and such).
It is a real 64-bit implementation of the BASIC programming language (your QB programs can easily use gigs of memory and such) - although apparently under Windows it only compiles to 32-bit due to the current unavailability (?) of a free/LGPL 64-bit C/C++ compiler (?) - this causes some issues for people under Vista or Windows 7 (not sure why gcc can't be used...?)...
Anyhow - it's something to look at...
