On Sep 16, 2006, at 1:49 PM, Alan wrote:
Can anyone suggest a programming tool that is reasonably easy to understand and preferably cheap...like free....
There are hundreds of free and wonderfully functional programming languages available for Linux. However with a migration from Clipper it sounds like you'd be better off looking for something with a toolset, rather just the underlying language. Languages are much more "academic" in the Linux world, in order to do stuff like the DOS screen handling you're used to in Clipper you need to look for the next layer up.
The database layer is handled easily; probably SQLite will be the closest to what you're used to with Dbase3. The other common suggestions, postgresql and mysql, both require a certain measure of setup and administration that is probably more than you need to worry about right now.
The screen handling stuff; well, one very common response these days is to basically ignore the whole screen issue, and write your program as a web interface - even if you only expect a single user.
In which case, instead of just choosing a language, you should be choosing a "framework". So instead of saying "Ruby", you'd say "Ruby on Rails"; or instead of "Python" you'd look for "Django"; and instead of "PHP" you'd go for "Zend".
I'd say that the current "best" choice for a language (starting from your position of Clipper) would be Ruby, and therefore the framework should be "Ruby for Rails".
On the other hand, if you really need to have an directly interactive interface, and web frameworks aren't appropriate, you need to start looking for something to drive the screen. "TK" is a good interactive framework, allowing you to build interfaces quickly and easily. It is well served by all the languages mentioned above, as well as perl, which is the ultimate swiss-army-knife language for unix; a little bit of everything :-)
So, for a single-user interactive program; Ruby/TK. For a web-based system, Ruby on Rails. In both cases, SQLite as the backend database.
-jim
