What are you views on the following languages: Perl, Java, and Ruby? I use Java some; it’s the standard language for introductory computing at Princeton and lots of other places. I find it bulky and verbose but it flows pretty smoothly once I get going. I don’t use Perl much at this point — it’s been replaced by Python in my personal working set — but no other language matches the amount of computation that can be packed into so few characters. I have not written much Ruby; it clearly has a lot of appeal and some intriguing ideas, but so far when I have to write a program quickly some other more familiar language gets used just to get the job done. But one of these days, I’ll add Ruby to the list.