We are definitely living in interesting times.
As a coder I have lived through several eras.
Text based applications – I coded in a mixture of 8088 assember, Basic (Compiled) and some “4GLs” like Sculptor and dBase
Text and Graphic Applications
Again Basic, with (if you can believe this) Graphics by ANSI strings. Writing ANSI code strings to terminals to control graphic overlay. I kid you not!
WIMP applications
For me this meant visual basic, and then more recently VBA (in excel, word, access etc) (I know, pity me!)
In between I have spent time on any number of assembler based projects for realtime stuff, but that does not count.
Web Apps. It used to be that web apps meant PERL, then it meant Java or PHP or Python/Zope…
Now, everything is changing again. The web is re-inventing itself as Web2.0! Ooohhh…
Ajax is the thing, but its too complex to use at the basic level. So there are several libraries of code that sit on top of the basic XMLHTTPrequest. My favourite is Script.aculo.us.
As the song says “Things, they are a changin!” Adapt or get out of the way!
Hop on over to http://script.aculo.us or download the video from the fluxium project.