The reasons for these will hopefully emerge as I begin posting. But I will try and spell them out here

Java :I like java for two reasons , its one of the most widely used languages in the enterprise space and the second and very important reason are the Java IDEs. Both java IDEs I use namely Eclipse and Netbeans are Free and amazingly featured. Code prompting available in both IDEs make mastering an API a lot easier than learning the same functionality using other languages or platforms. Also, I love Javadoc !. It really makes picking up new APIs a little easier

Python : My first crack at automating anything came with Perl scripting. I will not lie if I say that If I have to do anything today I will first use Perl. But after several year of Perl use I found I was re-using very little code. I have to get more object oriented in the way I code, and since I never quite got a hang of Perl objects , and its namespace conventions!. Python which is at its heart a purely object oriented scripting language with libraries that easily rival Java was a natural scripting alternative.Learning Python I hope will teach me how to script smart objects that will beg to be reused.

Javascript : This is a surprising bedfellow to my codeitch. I want to learn javascript simply because it is becoming very fashionable. Google Maps and gmail have AJAX at their core and Javascript is the J in AJAX. Plus I have always fancied having a web frontend to everything I do and I am sure Javascript will beg to be used when that happens.

The above are the three languages I want to master.

Apart from these there are two platforms that I want to get comfortable with and they are

Excel : Everyone in the business world uses Excel. Spreadsheets were the PCs killer App and Excel is in my mind microsofts great product. I have seen the amazing things ou can do in Excel without writing a single line of code, and I want to learn to use its power.

Matlab: This platform from Mathworks is the bread and butter of engineering computation. I am anything but an engineer but have seen matlabs power when it comes to simulations. A lot of the very academic questions that I have in my research can really benefit from learning the Matlab platform and no I am not fully convinced on why exactly I need to use Matlab, maybe I will find a more concrete reason.

refs: My tumblr feed