Im looking for a language with the following: 1) Easy to learn, or at least not difficult 2) Useful, for little helpful applications to moderate sized applications 3) Free 4) Mainly Notepad, or text orientated 5) Widely used, or moderately popular/well known Thanks for any advice. Any tutorial links would be fantastic!
when I say little helpful applications i mean something that could store files or sort them or that kind of helpful
The only free one is incredibly basic ones / old ones, such as batch or qbasic. Your best bet is Visual Basic, you can create very nice applications in it and it's easy to learn. You should be able to find a free compiler somewhere, but the most popular is Microsoft's, which costs money.
On contrary, there are plenty of free compilers. I suggest Perl, as very easy, and for Windows you have free Activeperl compiler. But when you want to make graphic interfaces there is no easy way. The most popular are C++ and Java, but it takes some time to learn, and forget notepad.
It depends, you can use perl, python, php or even ruby. You could try also Java, but the web part is more complicated. Oh, and bash scripts are nice (CGI)
For your requirements I would go with Python. If you pick Visual Basic you can use the free express edition from Microsoft, but definitely not notepad. Nonetheless, I would recommend Python. Here are some tutorials to get you started: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ http://www.awaretek.com/tutorials.html - nice list of tutorials for python http://www.sthurlow.com/python/ And there are many many more, google is your friend.