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How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops?
DonLab writes "I was a proficient software engineer in the 1980s, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal programs, as well as working in 370 and 8080 assembly language & pre-relational DBMS systems. My hands-on programming career ended when I became a freelance analyst and designer, ultimately retiring young in the early '90s. Now I'd like to reenter the field, but I'm finding that I know nothing about today's post-C languages, programming tools, and computing environments. I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application. Can I be the only pre-GUI software designer or hobbyist searching for a way to update his skills for Windows, iOS, or Android?"
It's hard to get a job these days as anything but a code monkey. Anything really interesting (operating systems, compilers, games, etc.) will net you little to no pay because there's so many people who don't mind doing it for free or cheap.
I see the fucktards are moderating today.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
> A commercial software developer would have to be nuts to put their company entirely into Microsoft's basket
Yes because it's just commercial insanity to back the fastest rising programming language produced by the market leader who has by far the biggest market share... Seems to have worked out OK for the vast majority of companies that have done it though. I'll stick with C# thank you (despite being trained in C++ and Java) - because that's where all the jobs are at the moment, which is kind of relevant when considering a career.
> C++, or Java would be better choices for a Windows application because it remains portable, it's easier to go from version to version of Windows.
Totally disagree about Java. Java is *notoriously* bad for developing windows apps (slow performance and high RAM usage) which is the whole reason it's never really taken off outside the academic and science communities. Personally, I've got 80 applications installed on this machine and not a single one of them is written in Java. In fact I can't even think of any popular apps that run under the JVM. C++ however is obviously very widely used and multi-platform.
Personally I'd go with a .NET language (C#) as it's very easy to learn and therefore will be quick for the OP to get back in the game.