Paul Lutus wrote:
>  I agree with your point, but the OP is quite obviously planning to amend his
>  knowledge base with a small bit of programming, just enough to accomplish
>  some specific objectives in a particular field.
> 
>  This is actually a rather common personal goal, and in such a case I try to
>  think of a single language that will meet the requirement ad well as convey
>  good programming notions.
> 
>  For someone intent on learning programming in depth, yes, multiple
>  languages. For someone who just wants to add to his knowledge of computers
>  and write a few very specific applications, that's a different story, and a
>  more difficult choice.
>    
IIRC the original poster specified a domain (financial modeling and 
graphics). Aside from the obvious "use the language your colleagues know 
best" advice, I recommended R, because there's a lot of existing 
software already in R for that specific domain, and because the 
underlying runtime is very efficient on that type of problem.

But in the *absence* of a domain -- just someone who wants to "learn 
programming" -- I would recommend the following:

1. Go to a good bookstore's programming section. It doesn't have to be 
Powells Tech Books, but if you live in Portland, Oregon ... :)
2. Find a bunch of beginners' books and pick the one you think would be 
the easiest to work with. Most of them are language-specific, so that 
will dictate the language.

Certainly for Ruby, Chris Pine's "Learn to Program" would be at the top 
of my list. I don't know about similar books for Python or Perl, but I'm 
sure they exist. I'd recommend sticking with one of the "big three" 
dynamic languages, Ruby, Python or Perl. Any language that requires 
something more complicated that

$ ruby -e 'puts "Hello, world!"'

is not suitable for a beginner. :)

-- 

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.