Here are some of my thoughts. (WARNING: Some of these thoughts are
relatively unreasoned and unreasonable!!)

Perl: I've heard a lot about Perl, but never managed to learn it yet.
Probably because I've tried to learn from the man pages, which is a very bad
idea. I also keep hearing about it being readable, but I've never seen a
single readable piece of Perl code yet.

Java: Currently my language of choice, although I occasionally worry about
it being a Sun technology and not a totally open one. However, it seems that
Sun is keeping everything very open. Their ownership of the technology seems
to be a Good Thing, as they are making sure that other people's
implementations of Java conform to their spec. MS is pulling out of Java (no
Java in WinXP I have heard), but they haven't stopped you installing Sun's
JRE, which you'd want anyway if you're using Java2.

Cobol: I know there's a lot of software written in this language and there
are a lot of experts in it. There's also a lot of unstructured cobol around.
And reading all those capital letters gives me a headache. (I know, you
don't have to use capitals. But the old programmers like it).

C: I like to write in C, but I tend to spend more time debugging the code
than writing it as it is so easy to get your pointers in a twist. It's also
quite difficult to keep your code portable.

C++: I honestly think this is one of the worst languages ever created.

Kylix/Delphi: Lovely language, virtually no portability.

PHP: Nice portable language for web pages. I'm currently getting into using
JSP instead (jakarta.apache.org/tomcat) which is even nicer. It means I can
stick to Java for my web page scripting, and create my own markup tags, and
access the database through JDBC. Very nice. My server software now only has
a web pages UI.

C#: Currently the nicest language to write in. Also currently zero
portability. Once Ximian have got their mono project (www.go-mono.com)
finished it'll be a nice cross platform platform. Unfortunately I don't
think it'll be quite such a safe bet as Java for a long time.

--
Cheers
James Ots

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