I need some feedback.... what programming is worth learning? I have done quite a bit of DOS programming - quick basic, turbo C, turbo assembler, and visual basic 4. All woefully out of date. I had picked up some windows 3.1 programing books that I finally threw out. I thought they were interesting in that he showed you how to do things the hard way before all the IDEs came along. But realistically... I didn't have MS C for dos nor the development kit.
I DO have visual C++5...which I never really learned but finally got some books for. But....even this is really old..... is it worth messing with? It looks like it could take a long time to learn.
At this point what is no longer worth learning? What is a good entry point today?
Yeah, it depends on what kind of programs you want to develop. If you want to build web applications, I can recommend php/javascript, it's fairly easy to get started. For desktop applications, my favourite IDE is Delphi, which uses the Pascal language. It's not cheap if you want to buy it, but you can try Lazarus, a free clone of it.
Here's my recommendations depending on what you intend to do:
DarkBASIC: If you want to make games from scratch as fast as possible without using a commercial engine.
C/C++: If you want to make games from scratch with as much raw power as possible without using a commercial engine.
Java: If you want to make games or software that can run from within a browser, can easily be ported to other platforms, and don't mind that what you make will be relatively easy to modify by end users and may not run at peak performance.
PHP, SQL and/or Perl: If you want to make web-based applications.
VisualBASIC: ONLY if your need to make applications (not games) as fast as possible and don't mind being restricted to Windows.
I should also note that for quite some time now, Microsoft has been offering free "Express" versions of their more recent programming software, much of which has more features than their entire Visual Studio packages had from a decade prior. Unity, while being very expensive normally, also has a free version you can use that has most of the same features, save for a few advanced ones.
C# used to be important for getting into XBLA stuff or working with XNA, plus if you know C/C++, it's similar enough for when a game engine requires it for scripting, but there's not really a lot of reasons to learn C# exclusively anymore.
Programming itself is fairly easy; it's the design of how something can/should be achieved that's hard 😀 These days it's much cleaner to consider the environment rather than the language.
Windows development is quite fragmented these days. Winforms was very big 10-12 years back but is dying back; WPF was the big thing but didn't really gain that much traction, Silverlight (WPF/E) was the next big things though has now been killed and most recently the [stillborn] Window RT 😀 Although it sounds like there's many it's only really the Winforms or XAMl way of doing things. XAML between Silverlight/WPF/RT is at least similar but of course different! Web tech has moved from bad (classic) asp to webforms to MVC.
Gaming is a big subject and as previously pointed out, Unity seems to be the rage these days for new stuff. Creating a mod is also a good way to make use of an existing environment that usually support scripting languages (Unrealscript, Lua, Pyton, etc.).
Mobile devices tend to be more locked down in what is supported.
C# - easy but mainly limited to Windows environments. Jobs are plentiful though can be prescriptive in toolset
C++ - hard but likely to run anywhere with good choice of support libraries. Jobs are plentiful though can be prescriptive in toolset
Java - medium but I personally do not rate Java as a target platform. Since Oracle bought them it hasn't really moved on though there are commercial opportunities out there.
Javascript - hard without a stack of support libraries
There are many IDEs available, mostly offering free (though not poor) options.
Pick up PureBasic if you want something that's both easy to learn and powerful. The dialect straightforward and is also reflective of how you would program in C. So if you master PureBasic it's very easy to then move to something like C or C++. It runs on Windows, OSX, Linux, and Amiga and also has translations in French and German.
I program in C++ daily so I can speak for the quality of this language as an easy introduction to programming. Even now, if ever I need to whip something up fast or do some rapid prototyping, I use PureBasic.
Don't start with C or C++. They are not good beginner languages and require far too much inside knowledge and boiler-plate code before you can begin producing something nice.
I like Python primarily because there's so many neat modules available whose capabilities can often be intuited through inspection – like the BASIC interpreters of yore, you can use it like a shell rather than strictly for running scripts. Still, I don't know of any handy way of writing a Windows GUI program with it. PyGTK was a headache.
But, as has been established, the programming that is worth learning is the programming you actually plan to use, which depends in turn on what programming you want to do.
To add another Basic variety: I have used FreeBasic some time ago, which started out as QBasic clone but quickly developed into a more modern language (with multithreading, OOP and all that stuff), keeping the simple Basic syntax. The main thing I liked about it was that you could use C/C++ libraries with it. That is, just about any library.
For prototyping I still prefer QB or TP though.
But if you want to start coding for a living, I don't think you should be bothering with these toy languages. C#, C++, Java or some language for web/mobile applications would be the way to go. Maybe look for a language that resembles something you're familiar with. I tried to learn C++ and C# myself but find it hard to get used to the OOP way of thinking.
The languages you mentioned are still very much alive in industrial systems though. Factories don't get updated as frequently as the stuff they produce, and many are still running on 80's or 90's hardware.
