How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops?

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DonLab writes "I was a proficient software engineer in the 1980s, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal programs, as well as working in 370 and 8080 assembly language amp; pre-relational DBMS systems. My hands-on programming career ended when I became a freelance analyst and designer, ultimately retiring young in the early '90s. Now I'd like to reenter the field, but I'm finding that I know nothing about today's post-C languages, programming tools, and computing environments. I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application. Can I be the only pre-GUI software designer or hobbyist searching for a way to update his skills for Windows, iOS, or Android?"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fask.slashdot.org%2Fstory %2F10%2F08%2F01%2F2150243%2FHow-Can-an-Old-School-Coder-Regain-His-Chops" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=How+Can+an+Old-School+Coder+Regain+His+Chops%3F%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fb it.ly%2Fdkn2mX" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/08/01/2150243/How-Can-an-Old-School-Coder-Regain-His-Chops?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TpFVQzOv4xwg5mWGxaJgc5zWFkw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TpFVQzOv4xwg5mWGxaJgc5zWFkw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TpFVQzOv4xwg5mWGxaJgc5zWFkw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TpFVQzOv4xwg5mWGxaJgc5zWFkw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/0CyowG-R7Ps" height="1" width="1"/

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