Quote Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker View Post
However, if you are set against that, the obvious choice would be either Java or JavaScript. As much as I dislike JS and feel that it is a language that will change, it is probably the most cross platform, non-proprietary, language in existence today.
As someone who started in 8-bit Basic, moved to OOP and trained in Java during college, then to VB6 because unlike Java it could actually do GUIs well, and then moved to VB.NET because it was OOP, then to C# because it was more syntactially like Java and C but worked well on Windows - and who has spent most of my professional career programming web applications first in Web Forms, then in ASP.NET MVC, it astounds me that Javascript is making strides on the server realm by vehicles like Node.js.

Further astounding that C# is borrowing dynamic pieces of the js language to compete on the server with technologies like Ruby on Rails, and Node.

And then you have the constant drum of improvements to HTML5 and ECMAScript which 'promise' to bring cross-platform capabilities to every device, which in a sense, it has done already - every time you visit a website, they're all interactive JS applications and barely static web documents - all rendered in a runtime called your browser. Most of that cross-browser capability thanks to frameworks like jQuery, Angular, Backbone and YUI.

As far as VB6 - there's nothing about it I have missed other than the fact it was the first language I used to build my first salable application, but I probably couldn't fix a lick of code in it since I've long since forgotten it.