# General Discussion > General Developer Topics >  Deciding which language to pursue ...

## Old Dawg

Hey - my coding years ended back in the late 80's.  Mainframe assembler, basic & COBOL days.  MS C was king v5.1.  I have also coded for UPS back when and changed their coding METHODS forever - just lucky I guess.  My code was easy to read - NEVER needed comments to what was what.  Sort of like the Visual Studio stuff most people work with today.

If anyone knows what this means:  g=c800:5, you are from my generation and did tech work.  I built PCs back when and still enjoy a good water cooled rig.  Now I have a Dell Xeon workstation.

Many of you have done lots of coding with new stuff.  My last taste of coding was with Visual Basic 6 and Visual C 6 MANY MOONS AGO.

I figure if I am going to do this - I need to decide what language to pursue.  Not so much for simplicity but more for my target project.  

My TARGET project, and some have done similar commercial apps but need more for my idea, is a overall PC security app.  Reading allot and it feels like I still have the training wheels on this - the deep end of the pool is crazy deep.  

MY QUESTION:  I have VS 2019 and started looking hard at some projects since I retired.  C# looks reasonable, C++ is probably more what I need - VB has some pros and cons too.  

SUGGESTIONS what language to focus on?  Where I can get some good "common sense" coding examples?

Thanks!

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## 2kaud

'Overall PC security app' is pretty vague and could cover many things.

Can you be a bit more specific as to what you are wanting to achieve?

If you know VB6, then you might be interested in twinbasic which is a modern drop-in replacement.
https://nolongerset.com/tag/twinbasic/

See this thread on codeguru's sister site VBforums:
https://www.vbforums.com/showthread....inBasic/page29

Get it from here:

https://github.com/WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic/releases

Click on "Assets" for the latest release
Download and Extract the ZIP file into a local folder
Then run the twinBASIC.exe from that local folder.

Note that the current version of VS is VS2022.

To be proficient in modern C++ (currently C++20) requires a lot of work and I'd say about 12 - 18 months of learning. An 'intro' C++20 book for existing non-C++ programmers is about 900 pages...

I have no knowledge of c#.

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## wolle

I suggest you look at Python, Java/C# (essentially equivalent), and C++. All are well-established and modern. All support procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. And all are very popular (as measured by the TIOBE index),

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Furthermore, all are general programming languages but differ in ways that make each most common in a different area: Python for scripting, C++ for engineering, and Java/C# for everything else. Pick the one that best fits your use case, and you cannot go wrong.

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