A Dev Environment for the Returning Geek?

InsurgentGeek asks: "I'm about 25 years into my career in technology. Over that time, I've done the standard progression from developer to architect to team leader to program leader to business unit leader. While I've stayed up to date on general technology trends (perhaps more than about 95% of my peer group) - I have started to really miss hands on coding - something I haven't done for almost 20 years. It's not for my job, and I don't plan to make any money at it - but I'd like to get back to coding on at least a recreational basis. Here's the rub: what are the right tools?" "'Back in the day...' you had about 2-3 choices of languages and perhaps the same number of OS's. There were not frameworks, API's, development environments, etc. I'd like to pick a toolkit and learn it. My goals are pretty simple: I want to write applications that have a great look & feel that will primarily be pulling information from the web (think weather & news), play with that information and present it in interesting ways. I'd like those applications to be usable on the Linux and perhaps Mac OS X platforms. I'm not a complete non-techie. I use Linux at home, have set up all the toys like Squid and BIND - but this is just administration. I need to get back into the guts of the machine. If you were me where would you start? What language(s) would you want to become conversant in? What do I have to worry about beyond the choice of the language itself? What frameworks? What other tools?"

Comments

I am in a similar situation

[marcus]

And am currently enjoying Ruby.

Get a Mac

[DrTime]

Get a Macintosh, they come with all the Developer Tools you need. XCode is an outstanding and powerful shell around the Gnu tools. The Mac OS X environment is feature rich with forward looking tools. The Macintosh world is not crowded like the PC world, so if you find a great idea, it might get noticed. At least take a look at it.

Re:Get a Mac

[Bastian]

So true. Also, clueful Mac users who might appreciate some crazy idea you got aren't afraid to download stuff they've never heard of before just to try it out, because there just isn't much spyware on a Mac. Same goes for Linux, of course.

Even if Windows shareware/freeware developers succeed in rising above the unholy din of the Windows software scene, they are going to have a lot harder time getting me to try their stuff because I get fsckin' paranoid when I'm sitting in front of a Windows computer.

Python is a good place to start

[Dan Ost]

Take a look at learning python. It's easy to learn, fast to develop in, and remarkably flexible and powerful. It comes with it's own IDE (idle), but there are lots of IDE's that support it out there (I use VIM with color coding since most IDE's give me the creeps).

Give yourself half an hour and walk through the tutorial at www.python.org.

I still do most of my work in C/C++, but Python is my language of choice for new projects that don't already have lots of legacy code.

Re:Simple

[MaggieL]

If you still have your balls and haven't turned sissy, then the only choice is vi in an xterm...

I'm sure the ultimate authority on cojones is to be found posting as a AC on Slashdot. :-)

There's just so many out there who seem to be using balls for what brains are meant to do...

Re:I'd say... Java

[phill7]

I agree. I'm a C++ programmer and learned very fast to code in the Java language. Compared to the aging and incomplete C++ standard libraries, I found the Java standard libraries very complete and well integrated, which allowed me to devellop any kind of GUI and communication applications rather fast and without having to constantly seek for some extra libraries.

I also loved to use the great developper free tools available for that language, mainly NetBeans and Eclipse. Their code auto-complete and integrated help system features helped me to learn way faster the language and its available tools, and the Swing interface builder of NetBeans is really improving the speed of development of GUI interfaces (I didn't experiment Eclipse interface builder yet), once mastered of course, wich might require some extra time at the beginning. And all this for free!!!

Eclipse seems to become the standard, but NetBeans is really nice and does worth some attention too.