I learned Pascal 30 years ago at university, as a subsidiary part of my degree, but although I quite enjoyed it, I've never used it or any other programming language in anger.

I now have some spare time and thought it would be interesting to see how programming has developed in the intervening time. As a user I have seen windowed GUIs appear and then the world wide web and I've often wondered how these are programmed. I now know that the key has been the creation of object oriented programming languages - apparently there is even an OO version of Pascal.

I am currently working my way through "Groovy in Action" and finding that it all seems much harder then the first time, a combination I suspect of increased complexity of the environment and reduced capability of my brain. GinA for example is, IIRC, approximately twice the size of my old Pascal textbook.

But when I do get completely stuck, I find the people here on Stackoverflow very helpful, so many thanks to you all.

My ambition is to one day answer a question!