If you're going to consider obsolete languages (the keyboards are no longer made) I'd nominate Prograf. It was a dataflow language that would have been great for multiprocessor systems except for two problems:
1) It was released for the Mac System 3 and never successfully transitioned to later systems, and
2) There was no text representation of the programs, it was all graphic, which was quickly too verbose to handle as the programs increased in size.

Not clear on what you consider "good". The ones that occur to me are WxWidgets, Qt, and Tcl...which can be good depending on your purpose. All of those can be used on Linux, Apple, and MSWind, and probably on BSD. All of them can be used from C, C++, Python, and Ruby. And, I assume, other languages.

If you want a good graphic builder IDE, then Qt has some quite decent tools. I'm not sure about WxWidgets. Tcl used to, but they seem to have died of neglect.

Then there's Java which goes its own way, and has it's own GUI, and IDE with a gui-builder...but while adequate for many purposes, I find the Java gui to be limited even when compared to Tcl. Still, it *is* cross-platform.

So I guess it comes down to "what do you mean by 'good'?".

If I read the article announcing the release correctly, then while the basic C# language is (probably) open source, it's definitely not free. You can't make a version of it without the agreement of MS, and the released version by MS is ... incomplete. Parts of it are portable, others aren't. So you can only use it as MS desires.

IIRC the release agreement said something like "permission is given to any full and complete implementation that fully implements the specifications" I forget whether the specifications were subject to unilateral change by MS, but even if they weren't it means that the language cannot be implemented by anyone except as desired by MS. Also, of course, the libraries were not made available, which reders it essentially useless except on MSWind machines.

Now just because their public promise didn't allow something doesn't mean that they won't ignore any "infringing" code as long as they feel like it. But it does mean that only a trusting (characterization deleted) would put their own time and effort behind it...without some form of idemnification.

So I'm going to pass on C#. It'd rather trust Oracle's Java (which I also avoid, though not all the time).

Different langaguages are different.

OTOH, I disagree with the basic premise of the article. It is my belief that one shouldn't learn a new language to improve ones job prospects, but rather to improve ones skills as a programmer. So if you know C++, then you don't learn C# or Java, but rather Eiffel, Lisp, or Haskell, or possibly OCaML.

OTOH, If you already know C++ or Java, it's certainly easier to learn Python or Ruby. So easy that a basic knowledge can be learned in a day. So if you're tight on time, that will allow you to expand your capabilities in small increments. (But a basic knowledge won't teach you the libraries, which is where the important differences lie.)

FWIW, I first learned Fortan, actually FORTRAN, since it was before Fortran 77 was standardized. But then I went on to Snobol, PL/1, etc. I never did really master LISP1.5, but I didn't have access to a running implementation. With Lisps a decent IDE is nearly a necessity to start with. (Currently, if you want to pick up a lisp, I'd recomment Racket Scheme from PLT. It's got a decent development environment.)

OTOH, I dropped C++ about 20 years ago, and am no longer fluent in the modern dialect (something I keep meaning to correct). My current favorite language is D (Digital Mars D, or dmd), before that I cycled between Ruby and Python. Before I retired I normally wrote in whatever my employer chose, which, towards the end, was MSAccess Basic...a really foul language. So foul I wrote routines in Eiffel that did the work and just used the MSAccess Basic as a driver. Not only was it faster to write, it was also faster to execute, and unlike MSAccessBasic, the programs wouldn't arbitrarily start failing after a few months of use. (In the AccessBasis I used to need to save the programs as text files so that I could re-import them after the system corrupted them. Figuring out that there wasn't actually anything wrong with the programs took a lot of quite furstrating debugging, since a newly entered program would work properly. It's my guess that the system was storing some invisible binary code in with the source, so the source became unusable when the code got corrupted...why the code ever got corrupted I never found out, but it happened repeatedly to many different programs.) I presume that MS has by now fixed the problem, but it persisted over at least 5 years and multiple different versions of MSAccess.

That's a reasonable thing to expect, but it doesn't seem to be a part of the current US political culture. Is it even any longer a part of the Japanese political culture?

Predicting the future is hard and often just look. But you might want to learn an new paradigm. E.g. functional programming. If you haven't done, it will be eye opening. Or a different environment, esp. if you have only programmed in a MS environment look at non-MS languages and IDEs. People who can work in both are in the biggest demand. Or network databses vs relational databases (though you can build a network schema in a RDB, since a network is a relation), etc.

Look for differences and analogies and analogies between analogies.

Bah! Vote darkness and despair; https://www.facebook.com/cthul...

Bah! Vote for the greater evil; https://www.facebook.com/cthul...

And then there was the famous Intel TV ad showing how the Intel chip could make the internet run faster.

I'll take issue with you on a number of points. Rome was first a Republic; by the rich, for the rich, and of the rich. If you were poor, landless, a female, or a slave you had no voce. This seems to be the model the modern Republicans would like to embrace. After the Caesars took over, the Senate was often mostly advisory or a rubberstamp. The Causer usually had the last word.

You don't have to be rich to be a democracy. See Costa Rica.

Germany was Capitalist. Hitler's biggest supporters were the industrialist, bankers, and conservative Christians. He called the party "Socialist" as it was a trendy word at the time. By no means was he Socialist. It was the industrials who wet themselves over the cheap slave labor the Nazis provided and the Nazis also broke the union for the industrialists. This resembles a certain right win US party in some ways.

Centralized power and dehumanization is a natural consequence of Capitalism.

errata: idea of the norm. not dead of the norm.

These next 2 years are going to be a nightmare of politically driven witch hunts against Science. They are also working to cut the NASA climate research budget; and I expect cuts in similar research done through DoD, USDA, National Science Foundation and others.

I can also see them killing off alternative energy programs, even research by the military so they can get more money from the Koch brothers and friends. Even though the military and intelligence communities have flagged climate change as a major security threat to the US, and the military would like to get away from oil based fuels as they were a major vulnerability in Afghanistan. Fuel convoys kept getting attacked.

They will do anything to line their pockets and torment those who do not conform to their dead of the norm.

Bingo! I'd forgotten that! That definitely qualifies as a scandal, since her communications are supposed to be public.

In the 80's and 90's there was a common wisdom that introducing capitalism into a country would create liberty and democracy. But China is proof that it does not work that way. Other data are Imperial Rome (Eastern and Western branches as well), Nazi Germany, Imperial China, The British Empire, Fascist Italy, and the Ottoman Empire. All of them had market economies at times in some cases very wealthy and vibrant. But none of them could be considered democracies either due to central autocratic rule, or through restriction in franchise based on wealth e.g. land ownership) or gender.

???
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. I rather despise Obama as a president, but I can't think of any particular scandal...and I mean something *I* consider a scandal, not something that titillates the shocked sensibilities of those who are appalled by a "wardrobe malfunction". The closest I can come is his acceptance of RomenyCare as his health plan (i.e. "ObamaCare"), but while appalling, I can hardly consider that a scandal.