Graphics programming; basic info and suggestions?

I did TI-Basic programming in highschool and loved it. Just about all of my prgrams involved creating patterns by turning on individual points/pixels or moving an object around the screen in a controlled fashion, such as to bounce around certain constrains, to move with user input, or to follow the graph of a function.

I'd love to learn some real world programming languages but I don't know any that have such immediate applications. Are the "draw" functions on the calculator a GUI? What are some non graphical applications of modern programming languages? What languages do you suggest I Iearn and why? What are some careers in which I could use programming? What are some languages that facilitate graphics representation similar to ti-basic? Can you tell me something about Nyquist applications?

I really appreciate anything you can give me
~Elliottt

The basic applications for real-world programming are databases and interpreters. Period. Either a program takes user input, processes and stores or deletes it, or it takes user input, processes it, and takes actions based on what the input is.

I'm sure people will argue with what is an oversimplification, but it should answer your question about non-graphical uses -- most programs, whether graphical or not, have a non-graphical component.

Even games like Quake, ( or the Quake series) function as interpreters on two levels. There is usually in ID products a console you can access by hitting the tilde (~) key. And the game interprets and responds to your input with the mouse or arrow keys. It may not seem like an interpreter to the user but the machine certainly can't tell the difference. The difference between QBasic and a given game is usually as much the AI as it is the graphic interface.

Word Processing programs, graphics programs and so on provide much of the functionality of databases. If they don't provide it all, they produce files which can be used in a variety of programs. Again, the computer does the exact same thing, regardless of what you do.

Modern real world programming languages have plenty of applications, be it a page description language like encapsulated post script or html (with the Javascript and VBscript extensions providing much of the functionality of most interpreters). Most, such as C++ which is implemented for most OSes and architecture, and Java, which is intended to interpret programs on multiple OSes and architecture use the Object-Oriented format. C is most commonly discussed these days in programming for embedded systems, which are systems which don't have the memory to handle the overhead of objects and namespaces.

The "draw" functions on the calculator are not a GUI. When my late sister got her MS in Applied Math from Brown University in 1967, she did much of her work on a machine which was less complex and powerful than the calculators I used when I went back to college in 1990. A look at any tutorial for programming Windows (such as Jacob Navia's in his LCC-Windows documentation) or Motif (which is X-Windows) will show you that the issues can be considerably more complicated.

Unless someone who knows you well tells you otherwise, I'd recommend college or community college courses as a start for learning modern programming languages. The object-oriented paradigm has led to considerable changes in thinking since the days of Basic. That's one reason why I won't even try to tell you about Nyquist applications. You can google it, and you can learn how to restrict your search so you will only get technical articles about it if that's what you want.