looking for good programming language

[sissyphilis]

I want to make a Fapioh style program, but much more advanced. It will have a lot of intelligence built into it so it will know not to tell you to do things like take a toy out of your ass if there isn't one in there. I also want it to be text with a transparent background, so the use can choose what port they are seeing. So they could be watching a playlist in the background or a slideshow.

I have ideas on how I can make it easy for custom teases to be created and shared, and make it easy for the users to customize the settings at a very detailed level.

My biggest problem is figuring out the best programming language to do this in. I can easily do the logical programming in an Excel macro or even in SQL-T, but those aren't enough to get the interface I'm looking for.

For those with more programming experience than me, what's a good language to program something like this in that most closely represents an Excel macro? Should I use something like visual studio?

[Mat]

I want to make a Fapioh style program, but much more advanced. It will have a lot of intelligence built into it so it will know not to tell you to do things like take a toy out of your ass if there isn't one in there. I also want it to be text with a transparent background, so the use can choose what port they are seeing. So they could be watching a playlist in the background or a slideshow.

I have ideas on how I can make it easy for custom teases to be created and shared, and make it easy for the users to customize the settings at a very detailed level.

My biggest problem is figuring out the best programming language to do this in. I can easily do the logical programming in an Excel macro or even in SQL-T, but those aren't enough to get the interface I'm looking for.

For those with more programming experience than me, what's a good language to program something like this in that most closely represents an Excel macro? Should I use something like visual studio?

Excel Macros use VBA, Visual Basic for Applications so I'd recommend VB if you are familiar with that.
Personally I prefer Java for more complicated stuff, but GUI's are easier in VB, creating the interface is essentially drag and drop so you can add a button then double click it, and it brings up the code to be run when the button is pressed.

The main issue with .Net applications is that generally they can only be run on windows. There are work-arounds such as running a .Net application through Wine but to be able to run them on any OS without work-arounds you'd want to develop it with Java, although it can be harder to design interfaces in.

For programming in VB there's Visual Studio Express (the free one):
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/prod ... ss-vs.aspx

For Java:
Eclipse:
https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packa ... ers/neonm2

or NetBeans:
https://netbeans.org/

There are plenty of tutorials on the web, you might have to go through a few until you find one you like. Considering you can already use VBA and are just missing the interface, VB.Net is probably the best choice.

[tijfp]

I don't have much time right now, so I will just throw this in:
Try python, it's awesome ;)

[arthurb]

I would recommend this for fast easy development

http://www.hodor-lang.org/

[kerkersklave]

Personally, I think programming is like poetry: http://www.treskal.com/kalle/spl/
I admit though that it sometimes feels more like cooking: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef.html

Seriously, if you want to learn about powerful programming concepts on the way and want a language and platform, where you can achieve what you want elegantly, I would go for Scala.
It is object oriented, functional and strongly typed, it has a lot of frameworks tailored to its language features, it runs on the JVM as well as inside any browser (compiling to JavaScript).
For the GUI I would go for scalafx if you want to run it on the JVM. If you want to run it in the browser via scalajs, there should be various options to build HTML5 GUIs.
While the GUI-Libraries are depended on the platform (JVM/Browser), all the usual back-end code should work on both platforms.
The switch from messing around with Excel-macros to a really modern programming language that incorporates many powerful features from different programming paradigms is of course a big one. So it only makes sense, if you want to learn something on the way.
It is however what I would use for the task, or basically for any task that is not low level system programming or needs hand-tailored memory management.

[ullr]

I don't have much time right now, so I will just throw this in:
Try python, it's awesome ;)

Couldn't agree more. Python is great and probably the easiest to pick up whilst still giving the the functionality of a "full" programming language. On top of that, PEP 8 teaches you really good programming habits.

If you have a Linux/Mac you've already got the development environment set up as Python was created for Unix scripting; the compiler is already on your machine.

Python uses indentation rather than curly braces for code blocks, this might not seem like a huge advantage at face value but being able to clearly see where a code block starts and ends without having to trace curly braces (because everyone messes up their own styling/code from time to time) makes it so much easier to review code you wrote previously.

Python also allows you to implement and declare a variable at the same time - and stores that variable until you leave the scope - which cuts down on the amount of code you need to write immensely whilst still binding data types to the variable, so you get the advantages that other languages such as C++, Java etc have of preventing bugs whilst also keeping your code clear, concise and easy to read.

Finally, there's also the advantage that a lot of programmers have a lot of love for Python and so there's usually a module available that will help you do what you want to do.

Ultimately, whatever you choose won't be the wrong choice because any Turing Complete Language can do anything another Turing Complete Language can do, it's just that some make it easier to complete different tasks. As an example, this would be a statement as a part of a class in Java vs Python:

Java -

Code: Select all

public class Hello {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World");
    }

}

Python -

Code: Select all

class Hello:
    __init__(self):
        print "Hello, World"

And if you didn't want to use OOP to achieve this you can just write

Code: Select all

print "Hello World"

I'm not saying that Python doesn't have its disadvantages but if you want a language that is easy to pick up, read and allows you to write code quickly; I suggest Python.