Comment Jump into Linux, take courses if necessary (Score 1) 565
I too was a COBOL and Pascal coder in the 1980s, but wrote mostly in Assembler, then C, for airline reservation and travel automation systems. In the first half of the 1990s I was writing less code and doing more "analyst" stuff. I got a consulting job in 1995 which forced me to upgrade skills and learn configuration and scripting for Solaris, OS/2, Windows NT/2000. I then worked as a secondary researcher and essentially did no coding, but read and did self-study, including studying Linux. In 2000, I went back to university and learnt Matlab, and at the same time invested in my first Linux distro: SuSE Linux 6.3. I subsequently obtained a job at the uni which required me to learn Fortran 90. For my masters project I taught myself C++ by writing an open source library, GluCat. In a later job, I had to quickly learn Labview, IDL, Java and MySQL. I am now a postdoc. My teaching now involves Python and Scilab.
My point is, if you know how to program, you just pick up a language manual and do it. Preferably do it using Linux, where you don't need to pay for compilers and tools, and the documentation is all on the DVD or on the web. Sure, the learning curve is initially steep, but if you give yourself some credit, you can get started. As a next step, start your own small open source project on SourceForge, or join a simple, small project. I have found, as a coder, the large projects seem complicated and hard to get my head around.
