Carol and I got home from visiting family in Rhode Island late last night and I have been working catching up on customer work since 4am this morning. Here is a picture of my birthday dinner. The kids got two pound lobsters for everyone - I am holding mine and a plate of grilled veggies. Java : I used to do research programming in Common Lisp or Scheme. For ideas that worked I often re-coded them in Java for better deployment options, for better alignment with customer preferences, etc. I fell out of that habit six or seven years ago because I had a long term Common Lisp development job and also really got into Ruby and Clojure development. Both Ruby and Clojure are great for research programming and for some types of applications the deployment options are good. That said, even Clojure which is efficient (about 1/3 the speed of Java and uses about 3 times the amount of memory) wastes computing resources (hits the environment and the pocketbook). Ruby is much less efficient than Cl...