miguel

Hi,

I know this forum gets quite a few 'which language' questions but i hope this one is slightly different.

I have a project which has 2 purposes.
1) to help me learn a new language with some purpose
2) to create a tool for me to use and later perhaps for distribution to others.

basically I'm not sure which language to start with and 3 factors influence this.

1) my experience: I'd like to think a tiny bit of it may help with the new language I learn. I have several years experience of the following JavaScript, PHP, ASP (vbscript), T-SQL and finally I learnt oop using Modula 2 (don't laugh I'm old! school finished over a decade ago). As a web programmer I will soon have to pursue .NET and so some cross over here would be good too.

2) the project: It's to do with stock trading... I'll say no more :-)
I want to use a compiled language, so that all I have is an exe to install and run. Am I being naive here?

It will be for a windows environment.
Basically my project will need to send and receive data to and from my webserver, preferably in a safe manner using encryption. It will need to be able to read local files as it interacts with another program. It will need to have some form of graphing capabilities to show it's results in a user friendly manner. It should have the ability to run in real time, basically making calculations and giving results as it needs to. Also I'd like to have some form of screen grab capability for error reporting, e.g. if the user doesn't believe his results are correct he can press a button, screen grab and send it to me with an error report to allow me to develop and debug without sifting through endless emails (been there before!)
It should be protected as if I distribute this code I don't want other people to easily rip off my idea and all my hard work.

3) finance : basically I've got none... so I can't afford very expensive dev tools, compilers etc. I could spend a bit but at this point I can't afford much.

so the big question is taking all the above into account which language suits, my experience, my project and my budget? My research so far seems to say C++, Java or C#....
Languages, tools, books any advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Mike