OT: Language for the ages

John R. Hogerhuis wrote: Personally, I think it's a better plan to pick a language that is supported on a) as many current industry platforms as possible and b) on one or more platforms that's likely to be around for many years. Point a) probably drastically reduces the number of options. Point b) really boils down to a PC running Windows / Linux / *BSD I would expect. Taking that approach you can be as sure as you're able that either the hardware/OS will be around in 30 years, or an emulator will exist for that hardware/OS combination. (eg. I can see Wine under Linux out-living current flavours of Windows by many years) Bundling the language spec along with the source code would seem to be a good idea. Steering clear of a GUI to the app seems sensible to me (as I said elsewhere) - but making the app able to have the current favourite GUI stuck on top of it easily (whether that's native GUI controls, character-based, web-based, or whatever). Keep it simple and all that, make the app able to do what it needs to do well and avoid extra 'frills' on top. cheers Jules