[ale] Language Jihad!

[Davis, Ricardo C.]

Dow, perhaps you should help us by telling us "why" you want to learn a new
programming language.  Is there a particular goal you have in mind?

For instance, if the goal was engineering/scientific software development
and maintenance I would suggest the following (* are musts):

Scripting/Support:
* bash/ksh
* awk/sed
perl
tcl
(In my experience, bash/gawk/sed are basic to survival.) 

Languages:
** FORTRAN 77 and 9x (along tools like BERT and PVM)
[I know this will cause some of our kernel hackers to smirk, but FORTRAN is
the lingua franca of scientific computing.]
* ANSI C

If you have to do UI Development, I would add the following languages:
* Java
C++
Tcl/Tk
Visual Basic

Systems:
MIMD (If you're fortunate to get access to a Cray T3-type system, nCube or a
Connection Machine, it is the ultimate performance rush if your
investigations can benefit from such hardware.  Not to mention that
closed-source tools for code optimization are light-years ahead of the
pack.)

Cluster Systems (Dedicated slave systems e.g. Beowulf)

I've been out of the cutting edge of the high performance scientific
computing field for about 6 years, but lately it seems that for the
small/medium sized scientific research department Beowulf is worth a serious
look.  Check it out-- http://www.beowulf.org/.

Have fun!


-Ricardo

P.S.  I think that is part of the nature of the universe that
theoretical/physical chemists have a particular disdain for their
undergraduate organic chemistry classes.  :)
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