It is a very good idea to learn several programming languages. It makes you a better programmer. But if you want to devote all your energies to becoming a proficient and productive programmer and want to learn one powerful, freely available, high level general-purpose language (not domain specific), what would you choose?
Now Google has come to the rescue by adding another language to the app engine — Java. Now you can have ‘java’ on the client and java on the server. The former is made possible by GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which takes the code you write in Java and translates it into separate targeted javascript code for the 5 of the most common browsers.
Microsoft has done a good job. However, the fact remains that it released a product (Vista) and waited for a couple of years for Moore’s law to catch up and make it look good.
I found out that the wordpress blog program provides an xml-rpc interface and that the emacs packages weblogger.el and xml-rpc.el (available from Savannah) allow one to submit blog articles from… Read more »