Question

Is there someone that can suggest me a programming language that allows you to write quickly GUI programs (on windows platform)?
P.S. I am interested on only languages that do not rely on virtual machines and then have a compiler that produces executable code directly on the machine

Answer 1

I would go with AutoIT, it’s a very easy to learn windows scripting language with tons of functionalities: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml

I’m using it to automate some tasks, but it can do way more than that.

EDIT

Just to make things a little bit clearer for everybody:

You can create new applications using AutoIT and the Aut2Exe compiler provided. The .exe files created are stand-alone, thus require no other files but the files that you might need in your app. Everything is free and the AutoIT scripting language has a BASIC-like syntax.

The GUI that you’ll use are standard Windows controls. Among the functionalities you have the possibility to automate keystrokes/mouse movements, call the Windows API and external .dlls, manipulate windows and processes and through user created libraries (called UDFs) you can even acces local databases, manage networking tasks, encryption, archiving and many more.

All I can say is that it’s worth take a look and the first app I built with AutoIT was done in roughly 8 hours since I started learning. It took a folder as the source and copied everything in a chosen directory, copying files in folders named as the date when the files were created. So the destination directory would have a series of subfolders like:

• 11.11.2010
  • whatever.txt
  • whatever.png
• 12.11.2010
  • archive.zip

and so on. Just 8 hours and got me rid of a lot of effort ordering the files myself.