I haven’t done much programming in a while. Mainly stuck on hardcore hand coding (old school), like basic, qbasic, and basically just the basic field. I’m VERY good at it, HTML and almost anything that can be written in notepad. This whole visual element has me very confused. Does anyone know of a good place to start out in the field of anti-1990’s programming tech? Any advice would be appreciated.

You could try starting with php/java since they are free and can be coded in notepad (for java i suggest NetBeans or JCreator for the IDE, NetBeans if you have a somewhat fast computer).

Basically with java or visual basic, you just add controls to a form (visual) and you double click on the components to create code for that control.

I personnaly went this way:

QBasic
SphereScript
VB6
PHP
C++
VB.NET
JAVA
C#
PERL


It's kinda hard to get comfortable with the IDE if you never used one beside something like notepad but once you understand the main concept, all IDE works the same.

Java is a good start for understand object oriented programming if you haven't done any. In the end you will be able to use any language since they mostly are all derivative of the C++ family (c# is almost identical to java, php is like perl). Just try to stay away from Visual Basic.

I have been looking into JAVA, thanks for the info ;-)

PHP and Java are the big moneymakers and probably the highest demand.

Ruby is a posh language with a sweet sweet syntax, a strong cooperate userbase and will soon firmly join Java and PHP at the top. It's also very 'fun'.

Erlang can be a HUGE moneymaker (pretty popular in telecom), is a really fun language and just lends itself to elegantly simple mindblowing functions. (It's my favourite.)