I'm not newbie, I'm a hasbeen. I used to be a programmer. I worked for the government. I programmed in Clipper, mainly (ever heard of that?) and did a little C and simple assembler, too.

Then in later years I did stuff in Access Basic, digging into it to a fair extent (but not like a full-on pro working 40hrs a week at it, year in, year out) and then for the sake of a compiled executable I did a little Delphi (even less than the Access).

But the last few years I've been doing no programming at all and my computing is mainly confined to endlessly downloading new programmes I seem to think I simply must have and learning to use them and do video/audio/web type stuff.

But the other day I read this interesting thing about how it doesn't matter where in a word the letters of that word are, just so long as the first and the last are where they should be we can still read it.

And that tweaked my interest no end and for the first time in years I found myself thinking of programming again. I thought I'd like to write a little routine that would take a text file and do that to it.

And then I thought - what shall I write it in?

Clipper is gone.
C doesn't have a graphical UI - too unnecessarily labour intensive to write your own so:
Visual C ? I don't know, maybe?
Access is not compilable (or wasn't the last time I looked)
Delphi again, maybe?

But what about all the new languages such as C# and web languages such as PHP and Perl?

But PHP and Perl, web languages, require a browser, don't they? I want code that doesn't require a browser, but will work with one, too.

I've been at it long enough, as you can see, going back to Cobol and Fortran days, that I see the futility of trying to stick with old fashioned stuff.

So what's the new fashion? We never really got anywhere with 4GL's, did we?

But perhaps there's a new language that really makes all the old ones look sick.

If I jump into coding again I'd like to jump into the driving seat of the best modern vehicle - and by best I don't just mean fastest or most powerful, to stick with the car analogy, but the easiest to drive and the most flexible in use.

Anyone got any thoughts for me?

 regards,

 ab