I felt the same way but I tried playing implementing a quick idea in Lazarus last year and I swear it was the fastest ramping up I've ever had. Pascal/Delphi ar

I felt the same way but I tried playing implementing a quick idea in Lazarus last year and I swear it was the fastest ramping up I've ever had. Pascal/Delphi are a little weird but I found them easy to pick up. Then again my very first programming experience was in VB so I might be biased :) If anything is wrong with it, I'd say some of the widgets are little out of date or lacking, but since most of that maps to GTK primitives it's only when you need something weird that you might have to start hacking, since there probably isn't an open-source tool lying around like we'd be used to with JS/ruby/go