Rediscovering Your Inner Code Geek?

tachijuan asks: "I'm an old time hand in the PC world (started with trash-80 in late 70's). Along the way I've gone from the geek in school with the only computer to a CS degree to a position as a senior systems administrator at a major university to industry. And that's where I went to the dark side and became not a geek. About 10 years ago, the corporate rat race caught me and now I'm an exec at a midsize company. After 10 years of no code, it seems like I've never worked on anything serious (still do Perl, PHP, shell, etc scripting at home). Now, I feel the need to change this. How does an old UNIX coder/SysAdmin turned professional corporate cog get back into coding? I've looked at all sorts of languages (C#, C++, Delphi, VB(eh gads), Squeak, IO, etc.) but my problem is that I have unlearned most of the S in CS and the learning curve for the API's to both UNIX and Windows has become...daunting. Short of going back to school, what would you soon to be fellow geeks recommend as a good kick start?"

Comments

Build on your Perl knowledge

[Xenna]

I recently finished a pair of GUI apps written in Perl with the wxPerl toolkit.

The wxWidgets stuff is pretty cool IMHO. It allows you to build cross platform GUI applications in many languages (Perl, Python, C++, Ruby, etc.). I personally didn't find the learning curve too steep. I already knew Perl pretty well which made it a lot easier.

When you're comfortable with wxPerl you could switch to C++ or something if you wanted/needed to without having to learn a new GUI framework.

X.

i've done this/consider a part time teaching post.

[ncostigan]

i was in the same position as you. not 10 years. but enough. found i was programming powerpoint and excel to lay off people. so i found a willing professor, picked an MSc. thesis and jumped ship. Initially it was a surprise to realise what happened when i wasn't looking.
i found java (and now .net) amazing. its different than before. you don't learn all these APIs etc. you just think what you can or need to do and find the API. you learn where to look rather than learn them all.
the best part of the return to school was teaching young students stuff. it makes you learn it first. so one way if you can't afford the pay cut. is to find a night course (with sylabus) to teach. you learn and get the added buzz of teaching. best of luck with whatever you decide. /nc

Why work with API's

[Y Ddraig Goch]

You mentioned that you checked out Delphi. I've been a reformed C/C++ programmer now for 5 years. I'll not go back if I can help it. Delphi 7/Kylix (shameless plug for Borland) is a cross platform OOP language. The best thing about Delphi is that it is a component based environment. Now, having said that , the tools are there to do all the bit-twiddling that you desire. Borland has taken great pains to seperate the developer from the api's of the target OS. A form for a Windows target behaves almost the same a form for Linux. The database components behave the same way (mostly) no matter the db server. There are a plethora of opensource components (check out project Jedi at SourceForge), if you buy the professional version or higher you also get the source code to the components you are using. This is just my 2 cents but having coded in everything from COBOL to FORTRAN, and dBase to C/C++ Delphi has the shortest learning curve, the largest library, a fantastic IDE and the most bang for your Buck. Good Luck.