Hobbyst programmer – please help me to choose the right, time-proof tools
I am just a hobbyst programmer (recently worked as a senior BPMS analyst for one of the "big four" consulting companies), still learning to code, but software engineering will rather not be something I do professionally for a living. I'm 29.
There are a couple of things I would like to build (scholar notes manager, complex Hebrew typesetting software with an extensive critical apparatus support, a space flight simulator education game for teaching math) but I cannot decide what tools should I use for that purpose. Again - I am not doing this for money, nor as a business, and my main focus right now is academic and completely outside of IT.
I have a strong self-thaught foundation in JAVA, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a little bit of C++ and Python (I have not build anything useful yet, just bits and pieces for fun, at most 200 lines of code). I know nothing about algorithms except for a couple of cooking recepies and nothing about design patterns except that they exist.
It's high time to start these 3 projects I mentioned above. But when I did the first version of the scholar notes manager in PHP, I was ridiculed by my brother and some other friends when I shared this idea, because PHP, as they argued, is an embarrasingly outdated technology of the previous decade. So I swiched to JAVA, hoping that it will be a more universal, portable, enerprise backed (and therefore long lasting?) tool, that would also be a better ornament to my CV than just PHP and HTML. So I've spent the last 5 months going through an old Head First book, learning SWING, which also appeared to be obsolete.
Please help me decide - should I abandon these languages and swich to Python+Qt? I don't mind that (I love to learn), but it again means postponing the actual production by at least 6 months. I am also afraid that other languages would not have enough extensive, well written and freely available documentation and tutorials.
continued in the first comment