I'm looking for some input, but let me start with a bit of background (for tl;dr skip to end). I'm an IT major with a concentration in networking. While I'm not a CS major nor do I want to program as a vocation, I do consider myself a programmer and do pretty well with the concepts involved. I've been programming since about 6th grade, started out with a proprietary game creation language that made my transition into C++ at college pretty easy. I like to make programs for myself and friends, and have been paid to program for local businesses.
A bit about that- I wrote some programs for a couple local businesses in my senior year in high school. I wrote management systems for local shops (inventory, phone/pos orders, timeclock, customer info, and more stuff I can't remember). It definitely turned out to be over my head, as I had never had any formal programming education. It was a great learning experience, but damn was it crappy code. Oh yeah, by the way, it was all vb6.
So, I've used vb6 pretty extensively, I've used c++ in my classes (intro to programming up to algorithms), used Java a little bit in another class (had to write a ping client program, pretty easy) and used Java for some simple Project Euler problems to help learn syntax and such when writing the program for the class. I've also used C# a bit for my own simple personal projects (simple programs, one which would just generate an HTTP request on a list of websites and notify if one responded unexpectedly or not at all, and another which just held a list of things to do and periodically reminded me to do them), things I would've written in vb6 a year or two ago. I've just started using Qt C++ for some undergrad research I'm working on.
Now I've had some formal education, I [think I] understand organization in programming a lot better (I didn't even use classes in my vb6 programs where I really should have), how it's important to structure code, split into functions where appropriate, document properly, efficiency both in memory and speed, dynamic and modular programming etc. I was looking for some input on which language to pick up as my "primary". As I'm not a "real programmer", it will be mostly hobby projects, but will include some 'real' projects I'm sure.
From my perspective: QtC++ and Java are cross platform, which is cool. Java and C# run in a virtual machine, but I'm not sure if that's a big deal (something extra to distribute, possibly a bit slower? I think Qt would require additional distributables too, right?). I don't really know too much more than this, so I appreciate any help, thanks!
TL;DR Am an avocational programmer looking for a language, want quick and straight forward development, liked vb6, will be working with database driven GUI apps- should I go with QtC++, Java, C#, or perhaps something else?
