I am about to retire and would like to learn a programming language both for fun and practical purposes. The question is, which one? John Whitehead
One powerful and comprehensive programming system is now available as a free download: Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. The site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/ will walk you through its capabilities and it is also supported by a Coding4Fun site. However, the minimum installation is 500MB, and a full installation takes up 1.3GB, including programming libraries and Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 database.
At the other extreme, there's Squeak: "a modern, open-source, highly portable, fast and full-featured implementation" of the object-oriented Smalltalk language. It is available for Windows, Mac OS and Unix/Linux, OS/2 Warp and RiscOS. The Windows download is just under 15MB.
There's a good list of free languages at www.danish-shareware.dk/progsoft/progsoft.html, including Euphoria.
Comment on comments: (1) Note that Mr Whitehead said he was "about to retire". If he'd said he was "about to start college" or something, then I would have recommended different languages. (2) I was thinking of making it a condition for comments that you should provide examples of things you've written in VBE and Squeak ... but then, I've never tried Python ;-)
