A Dev Environment for the Returning Geek? 156
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?"
Just great!! (Score:2, Funny)
Tremendous progress in development tools (Score:5, Funny)
A lot of people went on some tangent about these IDE thingies. Don't worry about that, it proved to be totally useless in the end.
Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
Console + vi + cc = like 20 years never happened (Score:5, Funny)
Fire up a console under Linux, use vi and cc, and you'll feel right at home as if 20 years had not passed.
Lazarus (Score:3, Funny)
Try Lazarus, http://lazarus.freepascal.org/ [freepascal.org]