I used to be visual basic 6 programmer, i was pleased with visual basic : it is high level language that do stuff fast,easy to learn, easy to do stuff in,you can drag and drop stuff to the form and write your code,it is simply amazing.however microsoft buried VB6 and pointed us to VB.NET which is so different that it is not the old VB anymore.I didn't like what microsoft did and would like to look somewhere AWAY from microsoft and from any other proprietary language . I would like to look into a similar language that is easy,cross platform (windows / Linux), object oriented, visual design, non proprietary and compile (for some guarding against reverse engineering). i am freelancer so the choice is entirely mine,i don't care about performance of programs, the time taken to develop a given programs is much more important. desktop / database / GUI /networking programming is what i am looking for. so any such language offered by our open source community ? thank you so much