On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Kris Browne wrote: > If anyone were to ask what language of the family to learn at this > point, I'd point towards Ruby. Best parts of Perl and Python's syntax, > fully OO end to end, and provides a language basis for what seems to be > the most flexible RAD web platform around (Rails). For web apps and database frontends, it does really well. I've been very impressed with what our programmers have done with it for our data entry system, and for other data management work. There also is a Ruby or RoR interface for R that we've used to make graphs. Maybe matplotlib was another option, but I didn't know about it. The graphing had to be very flexible and precise (accepting varying numbers of variables for a bar graph that always had to fit in a certain space and display various labels). R did that well after being called by Ruby with certain parameters specified. Mike