Strengths and Weaknesses

I'm not the type to gush. I'm not an ideological platform freak or a disciple for some clever and deliciously quirky scripting language somewhere. All languages are good in their own way. Some are better than others at particular tasks. In a lot of situations, which language you use doesn't matter at all. Scrimping on allocating space in your brain to learn yet another language is a perfectly acceptable reason to avoid learning a new language. After all, learning is a good thing, but so is spending time with your children.

REALbasic is not a replacement for Java, especially for large-scale enterprise applications. It if sits on the server, stick with Java. If your project needs a responsive cross-platform graphical user interface, REALbasic may be the perfect solution.

Although REALbasic is relatively easy to program with, it's also not a scripting language. It's definitely a programming language. In particular, it's statically typed and compiled. This means that there are some quick and dirty scripting tasks that are better done in Python (or Perl or Ruby).

As for me, I don't like typing, so I am not particularly pleased with any extra typing I might have to do. I really don't like brackets of the sort used by JavaScript and Java, although they are admittedly useful in certain circumstances. For this reason, I prefer Python for scripting and REALbasic for developing client applications. When developing content management solutions, I use Java and Apache Cocoon on the server.

If you're learning to program and you need to pick a language to learn in, I can think of no better language than REALbasic. Java is a lot easier to learn if you already know Basic. Python is good, but it lacks an IDE with the polish of REALbasic; therefore, it is not as easy to develop GUI applications in Python as it is with REALbasic. There's nothing like being able to design a user interface to provide a novice programmer with enough psychological gratification and sense of accomplishment to give them the energy to overcome the obstacles and challenges that are such an integral part of the programming challenge.