macOS BlueJ

eric/ said:

Hey guys

So I'm studying to be an industrial and systems engineer. I've taken a class on C# and did pretty well, that's about all of my programming experience.

So I'm looking for a language that's not necessarily "easy" to use, but maybe more intuitive for somebody who isn't a programmer, that I could use to develop applications and tools for myself while I'm working.

Currently, one of my needs is to develop software that allows me to pull data from a vision system, display that data, and allow me to manipulate it in Pareto charts, graphs, etc...

So I've been playing around with visual basic applications in Excel, and our current system is working that way, but I wanted to find something more "long term", and was suggested BlueJ and Java by a friend.

What do you think?

Thanks for the help

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I learned Java while using BlueJ and I thought BlueJ seemed like a very nice, yet very simple editor (simple in the good way). I think BlueJ is *great* for learning Java (keeps everything simple), but I wouldn't recommend it for long term.

For long term, you might want to look into something like Netbeans. It seems like what you're doing is going to be visual-based, and Netbeans has an Xcode-like drag-and-drop user interface editor.

You might also want to check out the Java Development Guide for Mac (Apple official). It has some great resources and information (including other IDEs).

Java as a first language is great in my opinion, because it's simple, powerful, and will help you grapple the concept of Object Oriented Programming (OOP). You also don't have to worry about memory management.

Objective-C would be another good language if you want your apps to run on OSX (Macs) and iOS (iPhone/iPod/iPad). However, I think Objective-C is slightly (but not much) harder than Java, because you DO have to deal with memory management (although there are some "workarounds" and other ways to "deal" with it).

Hope this helps