Any programmers in here?

[hunter]

23. I'm an Open Source Linux hardware kind of guy.

For my personal use Open Source and free software does everything I want it to do. Proprietary software feels very confining to me.

I don't like Java, and I've never had to suffer it.

If my kids were asking me your question I'd buy them a Raspberry Pi and suggest they learn Python.

I'm prejudiced. I think everyone should experience hardware limitations and the Raspberry Pi is somewhat limited, especially when it's running interpreted languages like Python or Java. And those limitations become a motivation to learn C, which has essentially become the universal "primitive" language of most computer architectures.

Heck, I'm posting this from an ancient Pentium III (Coppermine) laptop with 256 Megabytes memory and an 8 gigabyte solid state hard drive (actually a compact flash camera card.) The operating system is Debian, the window manager is LXDE.

http://www.raspberrypi.org

http://python.org

With python and a little hardware experience you can go where your interests or the money take you.

I'm an older guy. My original computer education was Fortran and Unix. As I was leaving university the "teaching" language was Pascal.

On my own I was always messing around with 6502 assembly, mostly Atari 800, some Apple II.