"anonimous" <n.thomp / roadrunner.nf.net> wrote in message news:b4gpu2$pru$1 / nntp-stjh-01-01.rogers.nf.net... > I'm not very fond of Microsoft though, I think I'd stay away from any of > their I like to separate Microsoft politics from technologies. > programming languages, after all, lots of people put their faith in Visual > Basic > and now Microsoft isn't maintaining it any more that I know of. C# really is a continuation of the Delphi project - it is very strongly support in the open source Mono-project - extremely rapid progress - very impressive. That said, I don't particularly like Java or C# as languages although they are not bad. But they do have large supporting libraries. Visual Basic is still supported, but primary focus is now in the .Net version. VB6.0 and VB-Script still have relevance due to their tight integration with COM. > > > > I would also like to add Ocaml as a language to consider. > > I've never heard of Ocaml before, is there a website with information on it? official site: http://caml.inria.fr unofficial nicer looking site, less frequently maintained. http://www.ocaml.org great book: http://caml.inria.fr/Examples/eng.html The links seem to nok work very well at the moment. OCaml requires some devotion to learn. It is not hard, but somewhat errh different - and the syntax is not very nice. Once you learn it, you realize the syntax really is very effective. OCaml is a member of the ML language family. It is very good at handling recursive datatypes. It deals with functional programming, imperative programming and object oriented programming. It is very fast - often between C and C++. With a little help from C functions you can write real applications where you would otherwise use C++. OCaml generates executable binaries where Ruby requires the Ruby interpreter and OCaml is faster than Ruby. Ruby has a friendlier syntax than OCaml and more focus on objects. It's good to know both languages. If you want to do commercial software development, C#, C++ and Java are the languages to focus on - but this has nothing to do with what language is the best. If you start your own company, or just hack for fun, go for Ruby and OCaml. > How long does it take to get a good enough understanding of Ruby to > start writing programs? > What books would you recommend for learning Ruby? 10 minutes if you have prior OO programming knowledge. You will not know everything after 10 minutes, but if keep a reference book handy (Programming Ruby, available online) or use the "ri" ruby interactive tool as reference, you will be up to speed by then. Also use the "irb" inferior ruby to interactively experiment with various expressions to see if something works out before putting it into the code you are writing. Read the Dr. Dobbs Journal article on Ruby by the authors of "Programming Ruby". This will take the 10 minutes - then start programming. http://www.ddj.com/articles/2001/0101/ Hal E. Fultons "The Ruby Way" would be the next book to read, but it is not strictly a tutorial - more a guide through a large array of Ruby related technologies. See "documents" at http://www.ruby-lang.org Mikkel