I didn't want to talk you guys to death, but I thought I would throw something in from left field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language) I grew up programming in many dead languages, Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, Forth, blah, blah. I. too, have used PERL well over 13 years, program in PHP and recently been poking around with Python and wxPython. (um, did I mention Tcl & Tk ? and jimmy cricket, lets not start talking about vendor's specific scripting languages, shell script, etc.) I pretty much agree with everything I saw, and would offer that you: 1) look for high level tutorials in Perl, Ruby, Python - get a taste so you can program yourself into a corner real fast. 2) then take that knowledge and set it aside and look at something like LUA After doing steps one and two, you will have a good sense of which language matches your preferred programming style (and thinking). (don't get caught up in the programming religious wars - you won't get the holy grail that way). =rich= p.s. love the blog idea - i learn more and faster reading someone's learning experiences 95% of the time, I am stuck with "I know what I want to do, what is the silly syntax???" Troy.A Johnson wrote: > I think if you look for "Perl to C compilers" you will get a number of interesting hits. > It's been a topic of conversation for years. > > This seems to be what Perl is "doing": > > http://www.parrot.org/ > > "Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator." > > If you want to know something about Perl current events from someone > other than current Python and Ruby developers, you can go here: > > http://rakudo.org/ > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > >