[NCLUG] Looking at programming languages...

[grant at amadensor.com]

I would like some opinions.   I am going to be doing some new  
development, as well as teaching some people who know nothing about  
programming some basics of programming.

Here are my issues:
PERL - Available everywhere, easy to write.  The GUI stuff, though is  
kind of convoluted for n00b's, and it tends to be a write only  
language.   You can write it, but you can't really go back and see  
what you did.

Ruby - The language is brilliant.   It does everything just as you  
would want and expect.   However, it is a pig at runtime, and the  
runtime tends to have issues like sucking up every available bit of  
RAM and CPU when you least expect it.   I have not done any GUI stuff  
with it.  OO conceptually is a little advanced for beginners.

Gambas - GUI is easy, you can easily connect code to GUI artifacts.    
However, it is not cross platform, and does not really seem to have  
enough people using it to really reach critical mass.

What I want is something I can write a real application in, something  
robust enough for real corporate use.  It needs to be cross platform,  
at least Linux and Windows, since I use Linux, but the desktops for  
deployment may have Windows.  I would also like to be able to use it  
(once I get the hang of it) to teach others the basics, but show them  
that as they improve their skills, they can use this for real things,  
since I have already done so.   I have been a programmer since the  
dawn of time, and have worked in many languages on many platforms, so  
picking up a new one is not really a bad thing.

Any suggestions you have for languages and where to get started on  
them would be great.  Also, since I will need to do GUI applications  
eventually with it, which toolkits may be nice as well as which tools  
to build the GUI.   I tend to like to use GUI tools to build GUI's,  
but then just a text editor, maybe with syntax highlighting, for  
actual code.   A full blown IDE is not that important, although a step  
debugger is nice.