Which language for a mulitpayer card game?

[gerald_weigel]

You guys have probably been asked before in other forms, but I've searched and haven't found exactly what I am asking.

I've been looking into learning programming. I have a goal. A game, more precisely a multiplayer video poker game. But instead of operating over a LAN I would like it to use a single PC with multiple touchscreens all coming off the same PC. I would like it to have a GUI and run either in Windows or DOS. I don't know anything about *nix systems so I wanna stay away from that for now.

My question is, which language would be ideal for this situation. My friend recomended Perl, but I'm not sure it would handle the GUI that well. Is this a bit too big of a bite for a first timer, yeah. But this is an eventual goal. And I don't wanna spend time learnign something that won't get me where I want to be.

[exally]

Java - great with interfaces, looks good, can run on multiple systems and can run on the web as an applet.