Programming Question

[wotw]

As those who have had to deal with my code are aware, I'm not a professional programmer. Or ever likely to be. On the other hand, I'm usually able to fumble around and make things do what I want them to, frequently having to learn some pretty basic stuff along the way

Comments

[points]

If you make it as a web-app, there's no reason why you -couldn't- use PHP.

[wotw]

Being able to use PHP will make me very happy. I had wondered if maybe there was some other language so much better suited to this that it would be crazy to use PHP. But I read your answer as saying that that's at least not obviously the case.

I am, as always, extremely grateful for your help.

[soong]

Unless you've done work in any other GUI toolkit that's still current, I recommend doing this in Javascript in a browser. The jQuery library will help with "move things around to dance" and "fade" and "find the things that are checked".
Based on your stated programming experience the second choice might be FORTRAN with OpenGL, but if that still works at all it's at least a decade out of date, and it's not easy. Browser+javascript will make a bunch of pieces (like, put an image at x,y on the screen) easier. And if you want to show this to anybody or have them use it on their own computers, browser is definitely the current winning option.

[wotw]

Thanks. This will definitely motivate me to play around a little with Javascript and and the jQuery library, and to see how that goes.

[dr_memory]

Possible alternative answer if you end up hating javascript:

https://unity3d.com/

[trom]

2nd for unity.