The best Paul Graham article on this subject is http://www.paulgraham.com/paulgraham/icad.html Which should convince you that if someone is telling you that language A he knows and you don't is better than language B you both know, you should learn at least a little of A just in case he's right.
Languages I know worth learning: C - to know how the machine works, and you might need to generate it as a portable assembly language for a VM one day. Lisp/scheme - to know how to think about recursion, abstraction and some data structures. Smalltalk - to program most things in, and to learn today the 20-year-mature state of the art that Python hints at and Java and friends are ever so slowly approximating. If you don't think I know what I'm talking about, try to find out where JUnit, or automated refactoring tools, or XP, or OODBs actually came from. www.squeak.org is a more direct good start. In some ways it just starting, we need good programmers with an open mind. Daniel PS VB - to understand what a disaster looks like, and that yes, companies do inflict such terrors on poor unsuspecting programmers. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
