I actually believe that. I also hear that the gambling industry is doing just as well, or better, than before.

Very good point, I'd mod you up if I could :-D

Also, a company will usually teach you whatever stuff you need. They likely won't be willing to teach the concepts and expect you to know them pretty well already. Languages are cheap. Different employers, eras, tasks, projects whatever will use different languages. You will find that you will learn similar languages very quickly. You likely won't have to do it on your own, but its usually easy enough to do so. What IS hard to learn on your own, is the theory - the concepts behind everything. If you understand the concepts, the programming language is just that - a language to "talk about the concepts". If you know the language and not the concepts, you're not worth hiring. My advice: stay where you are, learn the concepts, learn how they fit in with your goals and learn a programming language or two on the side.

Agreed. The company I'm working for is doing better than ever. In bad economic times, any company that sells products which will save the customer money in the long run is going to do well. People will spend a lot of money if it will help them save more in the long run.

If you go into management and don't keep on top of the tech anyway, then I never want to work for you. The last thing we need is another pointy-haired-boss who isn't keeping ahead on the latest developments. Good managers are the ones who have a good understanding of everything that goes on below them and this just isn't possible if you don't stay up to date.

That is all.

I'd be pretty pissed off if I paid for a game that promised Hero vs Villain player-vs-player combat and when I tried it in game, the players turned against me for doing it. I'd want my money back, because I'm clearly not getting what was advertised to me. I don't see anything wrong with what he did.

What happened to free speech?
What happened? I don't really understand this.. I always hear it mentioned everywhere, but I've seen no evidence of this mythical free speech my American peers keep telling me about. It sounds very much like a "do as I say, not as I do" type of thing on the US governments part. Every time I hear someone go on about free speech and free country and all that, my first thought is always bullshit. Please, someone, show me where this free speech can be found, because I don't see it.

Yeah, but his point still stands.

Maybe you don't use your desktop at night, but I imagine a lot of people here do... for whichever purposes... ;-)

While I agree that languages like Python may be better as an introductory language, Fortran is still heavily used in the scientific community, which these students will (theoretically) all eventually be part of. It makes, at least some, sense to teach the tools which they will be using. In any case, once you know one imperative language, its not too difficult to pick up another. Syntax is easy to learn.

Personally, I think learning Fortran as a first language is better than learning Java as a first.

I don't know how big the pages are in the books you read, but I didn't think this text was longer than maybe half a page - one page max - of an average book (of the books I read, anyway).

Actually, I use vim as an IDE. It does everything *insert IDE of choice here* can do. If not, you can write a plugin in a large range of languages to add the features you require. I can also run my full blown vim IDE in a terminal, which you GUI IDE weenies cannot do :-D
Vim also has syntax highlighting support for a huge range of languages too - more than most editors and IDEs. Personally, I use vim to edit text files, bash scripts, C, C++, Java, Python and Factor source files and it integrates well into my toolkit.

As an editor, vim provides powerful tools and shortcuts to manage text editing quickly and efficiently providing more conveniences (though they are hinderances until you learn them, of course) than most other editors I have tried. As an IDE, it provides me with everything I could want from an IDE: syntax highlighting, code completion, tabbing, code folding, multiple text buffers (actually, how many editors/IDE's do you know which support multiple paste buffers?), split windows, build tool integration, file browser, source control integration and much much more - and all of this can be run in a text terminal! (You can also run it in a GUI, but I'm not really a fan of it tbh. Also, theres versions of vim such as Cream which hide the modal-ness of vim by default, which makes it easier to learn and use) How is this not an IDE?

I dunno, I use eclipse for work and its the most unstable piece of software in my toolbox. Its also quite slow and eats memory.
I also use vim for work and it is extremely stable, fast and uses very little memory.

Feature-wise, vim compares pretty favorably to eclipse:
Both support plugins
Both support syntax highlighting for a large range of languages
Both have convenient editing shortcuts
Both support code completion
Both support tabbing
... etc

I admit that a freshly installed unconfigured eclipse is much much more usable than a freshly installed unconfigured vim, but once configured properly (eg, I use NERDTree and a bunch of other plugins, some I wrote myself) vim can do everything eclipse can and more (I can run vim in a remote terminal. I cannot do that with eclipse, for example).

Yes, vim takes a lot of work to get going, but IMHO once it is, its worth it. To each his own however.

... Richard Bartles book Designing Virtual Worlds. Its really very good.