Ask Slashdot: Best Approach To Reenergize an Old Programmer?

StonyCreekBare writes "I started out programming in Z80 assembler in the 1970s. Then I programmed in Pascal. Then x86 Assembler in the early '90s. Over time I did a smattering of C, Basic, Visual C++, Visual Basic, and even played at Smalltalk. Most recently I settled on Perl, and Perl/Tk as the favorite 'Swiss army Chainsaw' tool set, and modestly consider myself reasonably competent with that. But suddenly, in this tight financial environment I need to find a way to get paid for programming, and perl seems so 'yesterday.' The two hot areas I see are iOS programming and Python, perhaps to a lesser extent, Java. I need to modernize my skill-set and make myself attractive to employers. I recently started the CS193P Stanford course on iTunesU to learn iPad programming, but am finding it tough going. I think I can crack it, but it will take some time, and I need a paycheck sooner rather than later. What does the Slashdot crowd see as the best path to fame, wealth and full employment for gray-haired old coots who love to program?"

Re:Coldfusion

[lsllll]

If only server-side CF licensing wasn't so expensive, it'd be more popular!

Although many people who use CF pay for licensing to Adobe, Open Blue Dragon [openbd.org] is an open-source implementation of the Coldfusion language and has evolved very nicely in the past few years. At a major site I write CF for, they have 11 production servers running CF (4 Enterprise). Besides those they have about 10-12 servers running OpenBD (all Linux), some outside facing, and some of those have been running for a few years without any hickups. So, licensing, IMO, is a moot point.

There are also a couple of other open-source or free implementations of the language (Railo, Smith, etc), but I've been extremely happy with OpenBD, specially some of the additional functionality it has that Adobe's version doesn't have, such as the Render() function.

Re:If you were comfortable with Smalltalk

[Jane Q. Public]

Second. The Ruby market is going strong. Yes, there are more jobs in Java and Python, but those are "established" code bases that need maintenance... there is less new stuff being done.

If you know Perl and some Smalltalk, you should have little difficulty with Ruby. Also, there is a bonus: check out Rhomobile. iOS and Android and Blackberry development... all in Ruby.