On Mon, 2010-12-13 at 11:53 -0500, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > Adam Tauno Williams wrote: > > On Mon, 2010-12-13 at 17:14 +0100, Sven Aluoor wrote: > >> Hi folks > >> I have more than 12 years experience with UNIX system administration, > >> but I am too stupid for programming. My only programming experience is > >> shell scripting. I tried to learn Java, but don't understand it > >> because it is too complicated for my limited brainpower. > >> What programming language should I learn? > >> A friend said that C-Sharp (Mono) is very simple. Is this true? > <snip> > > Another one to look at is Python. You can probably get off-the-ground > <snip> > And python's the only language to use whitespace as a syntax element.... True, which is a serious -1 in my book. And there is an annoying C.S. uber-geek thread in the Python community obsessed with the most "pythonic" way to solve a problem. *But* I am the primary developer of a large Python application <http://www.ohloh.net/p/coils> [113K lines and growing] and it *is( an effective language/stack. The available toolkits are high-quality and I've been quite impressed with the performance [initially I had serious doubts]. My only real usability gripe is the craptastic type management, static typing would be a big improvement. [But pythonista's heads would explode at having to eat their own dog-food about writing 'self documenting code'].