use Perl

It looks like I am about to become a Gupta SQLWindows developer. I'm not sure what to think of it yet, but by (nearly) all accounts, its a good GUI development platform. I searched Google for newsgroups, but all public newsgroups are dead; the best source of that sort of support is a single newserver at guptaworldwide.com. I can already see places in the code where I'm going to miss hash arrays (they are being simulated in key/value parallel arrays), and fetchrow_hashref (there is one bit where it the code fetches column names of a global flags table from a system table, then stores the flag names and values in the parallel arrays).

During training, it really helped to just watch someone else work. A co-worker who was familiar with VB was taking shortcuts which would have previously caused me less frustration had I known about them. We are also solving initial cases by informal pair programming, which seems to work well, especially since we are fairly comfortable with the tool, but totally unfamiliar with the application we are supporting.