Programming

I'm afraid that, after years of resisting it (for no particular good reason), I will have to learn to program.  I'm comfortable with being a "jack of all trades, master of few" when it comes to computer stuff.  But now there are needs at work such that if I dug in my heels, I could probably stay very busy doing all the non-programming stuff for a very long time; but if I were to do so, I believe that work would suffer.

What we need is an application to track certain activities at work.  As I understand our needs, it could beeither a desktop application or a web-based app.  I'm a bit familiar with PHP, but I would be hard-pressed to write anything of substance from scratch with it.  I've read the buzz about Ruby being an easy language to learn and have read through about half of the odd instruction that is Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so I've considered trying to learn to program more aggressively with that.  But we've decided to use Drupal, a PHP-based CMS, for our website needs, so using PHP would open up possibilities of integrating more tightly with that.

Of course, as it stands up until I joined the staff, we have been an all-Microsoft shop, so of course we have copies of Visual Basic 6 laying around for me to use.  But one of the goals I hope we can pursue is the long-term transition away from MS towards anything else that puts us in greater long-term control of our computing needs.  But if I'm going to understand the code behind the apps we've already written, I'll need to learn VB at some point.

The past day or two I've been researching PHP frameworks.  From my very slight understanding, these would help enable those without extensive PHP experience to create more-complex applications.  But there are quite a number of them out there, so I'm not sure which one to try out, or if this is even the good hybrid answer (some of the ease and power of Rails, but using PHP, keeping me within the orbit of Drupal) I'm hoping it will be.

We'll see.  If you've got any advice, I'd love to hear it.