Einstein once said: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”. This is what's happening to Fedora and this is what's happening to me every day at work. I know it is sometimes frustrating, but at least this is an open source project and everybody can contribute to detect and/or fix bugs in order to make the installer be a good piece of software. The same happenned to KDE4: it drove me nuts but I must recognize it was a fairly good attempt to get beautiful and functional desktop interface. All of this software is open source and there are many people working hard for free to make things work fine. Of course, I think it's fine to criticize their work but in a more constructive way. If you think there are things that do not work in Fedora installer, detect them, list them and send them to the community. It is not necessary to be a developer. Just reporting bugs is a great contribution!!

My native language is not English, but Catalan. My (limited) English skills allow me to post comments in Slashdot and Stackoverflow, and I could even have a beer with you and talk about worldy things. However I often need to look up words in the dictionary and I could never write a novel in English (perhaps I could in Catalan, but it wouldn't be so good). I have been studying English since I was 6 but I know that learning languages is not my strong point. So with regard to the computer programming domain, where humans talk to machines to do things, there may be people that have to continuously look up the internet for code snippets or to remember syntax constructs of some language; there may be people that "speak" C so bad that often forget to say "return" to make a function return a value; and finally, there may be people that cannot even understand how to count in binary (0, 1, 10, 11 WTF????). So not everybody can become a programmer, in the same way not everybody can write a novel, a letter or even a post in slashdot :D

History books are biased too.

I think you are missing some info: what do you want to do? Depending on what you want to develop, a different language may fit your needs:

• - You say you don't like low-level languages such as C, so I'm guessing you don't want to write Linux drivers or create software for tiny embedded systems.
• - Do you want an scriptable language? Then you may consider Python.
• - Do you want a GUI-friendly language? On what platform? Just Windows? Then use .NET (C#, Basic...). On Linux? Then use C++ with GTK or QT libraries. On MAC? Well, MAC is another world. Notice I'm saying "GUI-friendly", not "GUI-capable". I mean, such languages are often accompanied by GUI designers that autogenerate code for creating interfaces.
• - Portability? You may use Java.
• - Would you prefer writing code in a smart, concise, functional way? Then you should have a look to functional programming languages such as Haskell, Scala or F# (the latter by Microsoft). Depending on what you want to develop, functional programming could save you a lot of time. However it can turn to be tedious to learn.
• - What about Web apps? Are you planning to write desktop or web applications? For web apps you should consider Python, PHP, Javascript and a myriad of XML deriving languages.
• - Now somebody will probably shoot on my head, but what about LISP? Are you planning to develop critical software that need to be modified "on-the-run"? LISP is used in very special environments where code and data are indistinguishible, and has a great macro system that allows you creating "your sublanguage". I started learning LISP and, on the face of it, it seemed to me a terrible ugly language. But, with time, that feeling disappeared.

• On the other hand, a language without a good library is a condemned language, unless it is focused for some sort of special, reduced purpose, where such library is simply a small set of functions written to do a specific task.

  If you are evaluating "speed", then you should have a look to this site:

  http://shootout.alioth.debian.org

  Cheers

Google is reinventing the wheel too in many aspects.

Oh, that's interesting. Thank you!

Perhaps I'm wrong but scorpions, as living beings, are supposed to be able to fix possible carapace erosion, aren't they? I mean that an aircraft with an emulated scorpion surface would also be damaged in the long run. What would be really awesome is to create some sort of material with autoregenerating properties!

The Beatles should change the lyrics of one of their songs into: "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I'm one hundred thirty-four?

I think G+ has become a social network for geeks rather than for everyone.

It seems God has no more ideas to fix this world so he decided to take Jobs with him to take advantage of his creative mind.

Lemmings explode after shaking their bodies.

Genius is not in those people finding automated ways of killing. Genius is in those people able to find a way to avoid beginning a war. Reading this kind of news makes me have no fear of the day I will pass away: there's nothing better than to stop being a human.