in reply to What language should I learn?
Depends a lot on the operating system(s) you expect to need the apps to run at. I would not say the transition from Perl is easy, but C# is finally worth looking at after the addition of generics, lambdas, anonymous types, extension methods and rudimentary type inference.
Shame there's a lot of cruft in the libraries from the old times. Especially the lack of generic types at the time the libraries were designed forced lots of "suboptimal" decisions. So they force you to typecast where there should be no need to, they force you to implement arcane interfaces where a simple lambda would be much more convenient, ...
And the Roslyn project that'll let you hook into the compilation process looks quite interesting.
Jenda
Enoch was right!
Enjoy the last years of Rome.