Pragmatic Programmers published "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" last year. I liked the book and would recommend it for any one who wanted a taste of today's interesting languages. Over the past year, I've seen that some readers were disappointed at the language choices and some didn't like the way the author, Bruce A. Tate, selected a movie characters as shorthand descriptions for the languages' feels.

The languages: Ruby, IO, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell. As for development and runtime environments, these can be had and installed at no cost.

If I was asked to name the one language that is widely used, has immediate practicality, and the runtime is already installed on your computer, I'd pick javascript, which runs in the browser. Get a browser that has a console for reviewing javascript errors. The java part of its name is deceptive. It is quite different than java, but the 90s Netscape folks figured that that imprecision would help adoption. I'm not one to rue days, but that one could a candidate.

You didn't mention what languages you were familiar with from your consulting days. One question to be asked is whether you want to look at a language that is familiar but advanced the the ones you did work with or would you prefer to explore the other streams of language design. If you wish to write personal application and utilities, there is likely to be a language tied to your platform. For Windows, it's C#. For OS X, Objective-C. For Linux, you will have to pick a gui framework and its language.

The pressure came from investors disappointed with Microsoft's stock performance last decade. Apple hasn't had that problem in recent times.

1995 and 1997, but your basic point stands. What one could say is that after 2009, when there was a lot of cash in the bank and more was rolling in, the company could have started paying dividends and still have the cash to fund expansion, manufacturing ramp-ups, and large-order supply-chain advantages.

My FreeBSD box has to be seven or more years old. It's gone from one of the 5's through 9.0 without a reinstall. I don't use it 24/7 (but I have). Its primary purpose is to be my cvs code repository. To tech-date the system, subversion was just emerging, hence, cvs. Probably should go git.

I did use a FreeBSD system for a desktop, but this was for a year and a half around 2001. I got an iBook in September 2001, but I had already left the Windows fold for my home computing, so the desktop went FreeBSD. I do prefer OS X because of the gui integration. For a small business where I was the de facto IT guy, I used FreeBSD/squid for a web proxy and solved some huge problems with an ancient Windows SMB server at zero cost: I had used an off lease machine that was constitutionally unsuited for the business's CAD work.

Documentation for BSDs is great. I was considering a wipe and reinstall, as the path of least resistance, as I went from 8.2 to 9 yesterday, but I ate my veggies, built character, and went and looked up the step I had forgotten from the last time a version upgrade occurred. An up to date manual for FreeBSD is available at www.freebsd.org. It also is downloadable as part of the system sources and the local version is kept in sync via cvsup/make. At the site, you might find the release engineering, errata, and security update histories illuminating.

PC-BSD has some interesting ideas and I do run it virtually. It has had application sandboxing for a while, which is something I see the popular, consumer oses implementing. The project is also working on the package dependency issue and I like the way they are thinking. So, while PC-BSD is relatively new, the project keeps its kernel and userland synchronized tightly with FreeBSD. They got good folks there and I expect that its stability should be good, though not as good as FreeBSD, because of the concerns with third-party windowing parties.

Now, as I look at your summary of your problem, I'm not sure that it quite makes sense as a general question for guidance. The computers that are off-lease have to be 2 or 3 years old. You don't need seven more years from them. If you could, you'd have put Windows 7 on them. Well, PC-BSD is no more a substitute for Windows than Windows is a substitute for PC-BSD. (Yes, that's right, if one has set up a productive Unix-like environment, then Windows is a degraded experience, with quite a few "You can't get there from here." issues.) I hope this isn't a case when someone sets up a problem in order to have others offer suggestions that are swatted down, because the constraints are such that it has moved out of the power spot of the technology being discussed. Besides, the applications are far more important than the underlying os in terms of box longevity. If the cost of wiping and reinstalling saves thousands of dollars in licensing fees, well?

Any way, to summarize, you need seven more years of Windows or Windows-substitue usage from your computers and Windows 7 is too expensive, there's only to be one more wipe and reinstall, Linux doesn't help you out, and the BSDs, with their windowing systems being orthogonal to the kernel development, though very stable, may not support the applications and processor that you want to keep using. Then, I wish you good luck, because I don't think any one else other than you is trying to solve your precise problem.

So let's see, I'm running Lion and work with postgresql, which I think Apple includes with Lion now. Well, at least that's my guess: I had to figure out why 9.0.x was in /usr/bin when I had just installed 9.1.x via the OS X binary available from www.postgresql.org (which goes into /Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/. That was a few weeks back. Yesterday I wanted to work through some examples in a book and needed to add some extensions from contrib, but I couldn't see how via the binary, so I downloaded source, bunzipped, make compiled/installed, uninstalled the binary (to avoid port contention, though I could have configured my source install to not use 5432), and updated my path via .bash_profile so the local (~/bin/pg/bin) binaries would be picked up before the one in /usr/bin. Used the lib and include directories from my MacPorts environment in /opt so I'd get readline.

So, have to say, I'm confused, what's the problem with Lion again? Because I have Pixelmator through the app store, VMWare Fusion (drag .app folder to /Applications), from a brick store, postgresql from make build && make install, and I've written my own applications in Haskell (ghc-compiled) and java. It isn't the scroll thing is it, because that really isn't such a big deal. Hackintoshing?

Really.

Really? I like OS X, but I'll use FreeBSD or Linux on a computer where I don't have a license for OS X's use. Truth is, those other operating systems are better in many regards for many tasks.

And let's think about who and who isn't in the app store.

Microsoft Office isn't. If users are forbidden to install Office, all the folks who are okay with buying Macs because they can run Office stop buying Macs.

Adobe Dreamweaver isn't. Say goodbye to web designers who are taught that tool.

I see someone cued the fanboys arguing that the big lockdown won't occur. I don't see that it's likely, but the point would be that those of us who need to run applications that cannot and will not be found in the App Store will replace our Macs with machines onto which we may install our productivity things. It will probably mean that we will have regretted giving Apple those last dollars and will not give Apple any more dollars. Are we in numbers such that Apple will miss us? Not my concern. I'm trying to get things done with the least amount of friction. No one ever guaranteed me it was always going to be easy, but I appreciate it when it is.

The standard answer is that homoiconicity and functions as first-class objects combine powerfully and result in fewer lines of code. There were problems with inefficiency of its data structures and, as I've read Rich Hickey explain, the list, an implementation, instead of the sequence being the abstraction. Hickey started clojure, which is proudly a Lisp, and it was a choice and not a nod to the flavor-of-the-month.

Let me clarify. Even though I disagree with Stallman over the necessity of all things being user accessible, I appreciate the point and believe that his is an important voice to hear. It's just there's a time and place for everything and clumsy formulations such as Jobs as Mayor Daley or "malign influence on computing" are counter-productive as he tries to build the world he wants. That's his problem and I don't believe the FSF has to respond to what he says as an individual.

Well, I know some of the answer. That there is something along the lines of device freedom, though we don't ask that of the microprocessors in the microwave. (Though some clever folks have put the os of their choice on appliances.) This is an elite freedom, in that most of the world could not make use of the freedom if it was available. The ironic thing: people are putting their own code onto their iPhones and iPads, so I guess this is about Apple having to support customizations. That doesn't make sense to me.

The FSF and Apple had a kerfuffle over Objective-C and gcc over a decade ago. The FSF won and Apple became a well-behaved licensee, meeting the terms of the license. Apple didn't start talking about Communism and if they needed functionality under a different license, they got the code or wrote it. Exactly what we tell those folks who pop up now and then and try to exploit work that is available through the GPL.

Should the FSF distance itself from Stallman because of this tasteless compulsion to express a polemic with the thinnest veneer of humanism? No. Why start now?

They do do it. When you get a new system, that Windows OEM license has terms which say you infringe if you transfer it to another system, even if you've removed it from the first.