Language question

[Luis Paulo]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 03:13, Sandy Harris <sandyinchina at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not to start a religious war, but I need advice on which
> language to use for an application.
>
> The app is language learning software. It needs to
> read text files, do a bit of parsing, present stuff on
> the screen, get user input & give feedback. Nothing
> very complex, just a general-purpose interactive
> program.
>
> There are some complications: The program is
> experimental and is likely to be revised a fair bit.
> Also, it needs to run on at least Linux (development
> & some students) and Windows (many students),
> ideally on Mac as well.
>
> My first thought is TCL, which I understand was
> designed for this sort of thing. Is that the right
> choice? What other possibilities are there?
>
> In case my skills affect the choice, here's a summary:
>
> I'm a moderately proficient C programmer and could
> probably manage more-or-less anything short of real
> time or kernel in C. However I suspect C is not the
> right language here.
>
> I also have enough skill to get things done with the
> shell, awk, sed, make, or Scheme, but I am not
> deeply conversant with any of those.
>
> The last time I wrote a highly interactive application
> was 20-odd years ago in Applesoft BASIC.
>

You may consider a web application. And by that I mean an application
that uses a browser as the frontend to the user (I never know what
terms are in use, I guess GUI is still on)

The good things: students are used to browsers, you may share your app
local or on the web and, apart from some different browsers
particularities, it will work on all OS. The data and the code are/may
be centralized, so easy to maintain and distribute.

The cons is that you'll have to set/rent an http server. Also you may
have to learn a new language as PHP or Perl. I say maybe because I
don't know the status of linux support of the BASIC alike microsoft
stuff (asp, Visual whatever, etc...). Also HTML, javascript, CSS and
DOM knowledge are requirements. Others may be useful (XSLT, RDF, ...)

For graphics you have pictures and animations, and flash, embedded
code/objects, etc... as long as the browser can deal with them.

So that's probably how I will think on doing it.

Others will probably say how you may use your C skills, or add
something using C on web applications. C and Java I don't use, cant
help there.
Regards
Luis