As this post is old, this is probably too late, but the first languages to learn are other programming languages. Then I'd suggest French.

Having been around the block enough times to leave a trench, at one point I tried to count the programming languages I've learned. It was well past 30, then. This may devolve into a discussion of what constitutes language, but at one point we were told, specifically, that Data General CLI was NOT a programming language, which my friends and I immediately proved wrong. (Who says you can't waste an entire file to hold a variable?)

I have learned endless variants of BASIC, awesome but specific stuff like Action!, Algol, Fortran, Lisp, Forth, Prolog, too many assemblys, binary for a couple of CPUs, the older Unix 'scripting' and preprocessor languages, Perl, PHP, Java, Javascript, dozens of others and a couple I developed myself. We'll just skip the meta-languages like jQuery & m4. My gawd, at one point I could even write complex sendmail.cf configurations that worked!

What you really learn from other programming languages is different ideas, and the sad truth of it is basically every idea can be implemented in every other language. Languages are the flavor of the day. The 'one tool I would take to a desert island.' Some make it easier to do one thing or another, but in the end they all boil down to machine code. And it's all basically the same machine. 8 bits, 64 bits. SSDD. One's just more convenient. Languages lean different ways, and generally they all have at least one good idea or two. (Well, except for APL. ) But just learn everything. Eventually you get used to it, you take the ideas across languages and in your head it becomes The Language(tm). I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead...

So what spoken language to learn? By all means, French.

Why? Well, French is unique in world languages in that the French are really, REALLY motivated to not let the language change. French is a pastime to the French like having lots of cars, guns and pounds is to Americans. As such, there's actually L'Académie française - an almost governmental organization to protect the language from language drift, with members appointed for life like the Supreme Court. They can all but outlaw words that aren't French, and as such, French is often the language of international law, because the meanings of words don't drift.

Think about that, programmer boy. Language without drift, only logical extension! That's like learning a C++ where your code works 3 revs to the compiler later. OMGWTFBBQ!

As has also been noted, French is awesome for ze sexy talkz. As we're discussing programmers here, get while the getting is good.

The really sad thing for us geezers is that we remember John's early posts on this whole 'virus' thing, back in the BBS days, when it was just him and no one knew what he was talking about at first. It would be difficult to overestimate how much good he has done the world.

It's not theirs to take. It's an American product, and yeah, some of us worked on it 25 years before they noticed it was important. What next, UN control of movies, rock 'n roll and blue jeans? Don't think so.

Intel is pretty corporate, and that's like a crime here on /. But for anyone old enough to remember or fool enough to listen, when it's all said and done this guy's track record has been damn close to paved in gold.

No, I don't mean Intel's track record with the Peruvian Jackalope, Global Coating or whatever axe you have to grind. I mean his job of being part of, contributing to and guiding a very large and important ship. Much of it before the average /.r could read.

Having been Z80 guy, a 6502 guy and a 68k guy, and also a guy writing endless apps in the Intel space and building endless machines, when it's all said and done, if your last words are anything other than "thank you", you're a punk.

Safe travels Paul.

You clearly have spent a lot of time on this. Could you repeat the text many times in almost the same way?

You're used to the "wicked speeds" and are looking for coverage compared to South Korea? Try some perspective first. Detroit has parking lots bigger than South Korea, and my personal backyard network would probably qualify as a MAN.

Kidding, mostly. But before you cop an attitude about dropped calls and poor reception, you might consider that you're using your experience in a nation the size of one of our urban areas and then asking for that in North America.

For the sarcasm impaired, here's a graphic. And yes, it probably could be argued that Detroit IS a parking lot the size of South Korea. Just with no DMZ. (Well, or all DMZ. Depends on how you want to call it.) http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/US/KR

Most people do. The Apple II didn't even have production tooling for the case until December 1977/early 78. Some early units were kits that were assembled and hand-sanded. Meanwhile the TRS-80 sold 10,000 units in the first month and a half.

Don't get me wrong, the Apple rocked. But it wasn't really a production machine like the TRS-80 was. If you're going to call Apple the first consumer PC, then it's not. If you want to include Apple's kit days, then include all the kits like the Apple I (go Woz!) and the Ohio Scientific Challenger, the Exidy and of course the legendary Altair, which might truly be first.

Got that straight. The TRS-80 Model I was for sale in stores in August of '77 [I was when it arrived], available as a retail purchase when Apples were just kits.

Thanks for correcting this .. propganda. Radio Shack released the TRS-80 Pocket Computer, the PC-1, in early 1980 several years before Psion went into hardware. It was manufactured by Sharp, had this funky black-on-amber LCD display and was followed on by a much more capable PC-2.

No wiki this time, I was there the day it was released, in the store that got the first unit. It's hard to imagine the impact this thing had at the time. A couple weeks before it arrived the Radio Shack staff showed me the newspaper ad for it and I actually thought it was a gag paper they had printed up! When it actually arrived it was like some bit of Star Trek had come to life.

I was just seriously shopping to dump Comcast for forgetting who their paying customer is with their sleeping-with-the-RIAA crap. This will buy them one month.

This is hardly shocking. This is the same NBC that 'proved' GM pickups would catch on fire with a side impact by rigging the gas tank with incendiary devices for the 'test.'

[See General Motors v. NBC section for an overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dateline_NBC ]

How long are we going to accept excuses for what is patent fraud? If he doesn't get smacked hard, we're going to be putting up with this crap indefinitely.

Maybe it's just me, but I've been using cash more and more over the last 15 years or so. Just to restore the basic privacy we all had before OnStar, Google Stalking and street cameras. NFC here is just Google doing what's good for Google, and, well, I just finished switching all my clients to duckduckgo.com, take the hint. Ripping out all the Google Maps stuff next.

We've switched every machine and moving all our customers over to it. The results are "different". Obviously very comparable, but now it's once in a rare while that we look to Google. More interestingly, though, often the Duckduckgo (Bing) results are actually better than Google's. There's way less crud, and Duckduckgo adds some interesting search options of their own.

One quirk to be aware of with Qt. Once you do work with it in the LGPL, then you can never upgrade that work to a commercial license, thus even experimenting with it carries risk.

Who wants a commercial license you ask? Ignoring the pricetag, without a commercial license you can't static link the Qt libs. So if you want a mobile Qt app, your say 150k program will have to come with 11Mb of 'library', which has been enough to blow some mobile app store limits (to say nothing of how much your end users will appreciated it.) Unless Qt's already supported on the platform, so that gets you ... Symbian.