His book on Dependency Injection is one of the few recent computer books I had to go through carefully, and with notepad and highlighter in hand. His work on Google Guice is really notable. This ain't just some Microsoft-bound disgruntled guy.

But it's not necessarily surprising. I'm not very familiar with it, but Google's Wave was one of those allegedly killer technologies that just didn't get the corporate support it needed to reach its potential as a disruptive technology. Still, there's a possible tone of sour grapes here. Hard to know.

I'll just say this: I would love to have the privilege to work with someone of his caliber.

In my experience (which is as biased as everyone else here giving advice) your Fortran and COBOL are worthless, if not a little dangerous because the functional programming paradigm runs counter to object oriented programming, Model-View-Controller design patterns, etc. The assembly experience is, on the other hand, valuable because so few of these kids coming into the job market really understand the difference between a stack and a heap, understand what a pointer really is, etc.

In other words, the degree by which your lower-level language experience can give you an inherently deeper understanding of what's going on in higher-level languages may be your saving grace.

If I were to offer a programming language of choice for you, it would actually be Objective-C. (Thus, I would tell you to target iOS for learning your first platform.) It is the simplest superset of C you can find, and it has strong origins to the 1980's, and thus may seem the most familiar/comfortable to you. Given your description of your experience and background, you might be well suited to follow the (free) Stanford iPhone/iPod Touch development course that's available from the "iTunes U" section of the Apple iTunes Music Store. That's an undergrad level course aimed at developing Objective-C and getting started in that environment. And it's FREE.

One last piece of advice to get your head around: make it your mission to write GOOD, ELEGANT code and not prolific code. If I were interviewing you for a job, hearing about hundreds-of-thousands of lines of code would give me the most hesitation. Less is more, and I would want a person who spent 80% of his time thinking about how he was going to solve a problem and 20% of the time doing the implementation. My own experience working with Fortran programmers (in the 90's) was that they rarely understood this, and often wrote GIGO.

No, this wouldn't be the game of Monopoly, but it would be a familiar Wall Street game of corporate take-over... and a stupid one at that.

After the Time Warner / AOL fiasco has resolved into a case of "what were they thinking!?!" and BEA smartly tells Oracle to stuff it, let's look at the idea of Apple taking over Adobe.

First of all, Apple is a company that CEO Steve Jobs has somehow managed to steer into remarkable growth. Ten years ago they merged and integrated with NeXT. Probably not all that hard since both were Steve's babies and both were geographically located in the same place and both were relatively small in terms of staff size. I'm sure the corporate culture transformation had its bumps, but not too bad.

Just imagine merging Apple and Adobe, which I believe is housed in Seattle. Now we're talking about a two-campus company, rewriting the corporate management style-guide, firing sales staff and overlapping departments, yada yada yada. That would be mess #1.

Then think about the move of the Adobe code to Apple technology standards. Only an idiot would think Photoshop needs to be re-written as a Cocoa app. Do you really think we would get a better version of Creative Suite 4 next technology cycle? The new product development plans would evolve into mess #2.

Apple does what it does well: they REALLY innovate and focus on User Interface evolution. They see software market opportunities (Final Cut Pro, iLife, Aperture, etc.) and they expand their product line slowly and carefully. They are for the computer industry what Southwest Airlines has been for the Airline Industry for the past 30 years. If they bought Adobe (and other vulnerable software companies) "just because" without any strategy or focus they would become as irrelevant as Sony or Microsoft are becoming.

Now what would be nice would be seeing them slowly and steadily applying their cash into the hiring and development of the best & brightest of computer programming (and hardware engineering and design) talent. Don't buy Adobe and get stuck with some brilliant and some mediocre programmers; poach the top talent away from Adobe with top paychecks. That's my Good Idea #1.

I have one more Good Idea #2: create an incubation machine that finds programming talent and innovative spirit and spins off small software companies that can write incredible native-Apple killer apps. Apple has the corporate strategy, the design methodology, and the technology. They also exist in only one geographic location in the country. (And I, a developer in New York City, would kill for an opportunity to do Apple-platform development without moving to CA.) And I will agree that there are many apps and utilities that are needed--especially in the business/corporate IT niche--that exceed what the small Shareware developers can manage. If Apple could spin-off smaller Apple subsidiaries that had a stronger link to "the mothership", and if Apple invested some of its cash reserves into ongoing but cash-strapped projects (Gimp and OpenOffice are real, albeit imperfect, examples) we might get somewhere.

The really interesting challenge will be if Apple can grow in size while avoiding the bureaucratic morass that large corporations so often become. We shall see what the future holds...