Remember BASIC? It used to be that nearly everyone who took up any programming started with one or another variation of BASIC. It definitely had it's limitations, especially early, less powerful PCs. But if you wanted to program, you could learn the essentials of BASIC and almost immediately be in real control of what your computer did for you.
BASIC is mostly passe', nowadays. However, there is a truly modern and usable version called RealBASIC. It contains a wonderful IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that takes most of the boring stuff out of the programmer's hands and does it in the background, allowing both the beginner and the advanced programmer to concentrate on her or his coding. The link above is to a 3 page review of RealBASIC in The Register.
This variant of BASIC encompasses modern programming concepts such object oriented programming and runs on Windows, Macs and Linux and will allow cross-compilation for all the platforms supported, no matter which one you write the code on. There are free demos for download and if you decide to spring for the whole package, it is affordable. If you have interest in programming, I think this is one you ought to check out.
Many programmers have said that RealBASIC is more truly a "write once, run anywhere" language than Java is because there is absolutely no tweaking needed to run the code on another supported platform, as sometimes happens with the other languages. I'm downloading the demo now.
Jack
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