BTW - The company as a G and an E in their name. I directly talked to the president of the company about the problems. Drew a complete blank. He had no clue what was wrong nor how to solve it. Oh well, golf tee time is at 2:00

I worked directly (as architect and programmer too) on one of the largest e-Record efforts in the USA. It was a travesty of waste, incompetence in management, disjoint 'silo' groups programming this or that part. Then I left the project. I got hired back 1.5 years later to the same project, and NOTHING had happened. Management on the project had such intense navel-gazing. They would have big meetings to congratulate each other on their wonderful leading-edge project. Money flowed like water and nothing happened. A year after that I had lunch with the engineers there. Still nothing had gotten done. These medical e-Record projects are about all about using govt. money, and not a bit about getting anything done. None of the leadership (both technical and managerial) had any clue how to get software written that might actually get used. Lots of theory, no application. You gotta love those Medical Informatics Phds. The basic problem is that the medical record problem is so huge, and the need for automation so great, that money get's thrown at the problem. But like most govt. projects, there is no actual responsibility or market feedback.

Leave the computer on Earth. Put an orbiter in the asteroid belts as a relay antenna, half way there. Much less energy than lowering it softly to the moon surface.

No. Programming languages need two things to become mainstream. First they need a very extensive library of support such as windowing, network, and about 50 other topics. Second they need a compelling reason to use the language itself. The compelling reason could be that the language is so nifty or elegant that it is worth the effort. In procedural languages it is hard to imagine anything better than what we have. In non-procedural languages there may be some new ideas yet to be thought of. Another compelling reason for a new language is marketing suits. Some company has a very cool new product and in order to lock you in they invent a new language to program it. Laaaaaaaaame. Only Microsoft would be stupid enough to try that again (C# was a case in point where they still had the muscle to pull it off.) Google could do it for a special search language but are not that silly.

Rule 1: Always do what is best for you. The company has no loyalty what so ever to you. Individual managers may have loyalty but the 'company' has none. Rule 2: Never burn your bridges. Leave on the best good will terms possible.