[lch]

As I wrote for another YaBasic program before, things that are compiled for Windows don't work on Linux or Mac out of the box. YaBasic is available for other platforms, though, and with the source code, the users could use the program natively as well.

Somebody expressed interest in reimplementing the SemiRand program in Python, IIRC it was pyg. Python is one of those newer hip programming languages that are "web-aware" because they are interpreted script languages that can be told to get input from and give output to a webserver. There's even the possibility to use modules that run the program in its own mini-webserver. Another programming language that comes from the realm of web applications is PHP. It is probably the one that is supported and used the most across the web. Personally, I would advise against Perl because I consider it a little bit archaic. I haven't used modperl to know if it's any different, but there are a few pitfalls with CGI programs that make it hard to develop. Instead of getting useful tracebacks, you'll more often than not will be greeted with just a "500 Server error" if there is any kind of problem with your program. I don't know much about Ruby other than the Rails framework. Another option would be C# or other programming languages from Microsoft's Sharp family, which is probably a lot more accessible for web tasks than any VB-extensions. This would once again limit you to the MS-World, though the Mono project manages to get some things across to other platforms.

As for GUIs, Python has bindings for almost every popular GUI framework there is: Qt, wx, GTK and it's own TkInter among others. They are all usable, with just some differences.

So if you are ready to learn a new programming language, I'd definitely recommend Python to you. If you want to learn as little as possible, look at Microsoft's SharpDevelop suite. Just download the latest free version of Visual Studio to start.

P.S.: I read VedalkenBear's post now, which I didn't before. Syntax-wise, PHP can be used in a multitude of ways, too. You can have a completely object oriented program, if you wish, with PHP5 it's possible to have exactly the same programming as in Java, but you can have it all very functional as well, or just use it like a minimal templating language. AFAIK there are extensions to have Java for webservers, but its biggest strength comes from being able to embed it as applets where the code isn't run on the server, but on the user's machine. This could open some interesting opportunities for some projects. The only problem might have been that Java was pushed to get widespread use long before the machines were fast enough to handle the virtual machine that it uses well, so now it has the reputation of being very slow. Nowadays Java applets aren't that much of a drag anymore. I think that it's a little hard to get into it, depending on your background maybe, but development-wise you will get very detailed tracebacks if there are problems that you run into.