[thanks to a full page ad in Aftenposten] IBM stands for International Business Machines [Corporation]. Now I feel like a kid who’s just been told there’s no Santa Claus. It never actually occurred to me that IBM was an acronym, it just sounded like a cool name for the world’s biggest computer company. Business machines? What the hell is that? It could be anything, from big lawn mowers to saw mills. It’s probably the most abstract name I’ve heard for a company, literally doesn’t say anything about what they intend to do (everything, apparently).

What’s more, if you open wikipedia and you’re looking for IBM without knowing the acronym expansion, you are presented with these choices, none of which seem especially plausible:

• Inclusion body myositis
• International Business Machines Corporation
  • IBM India [I guess this one gives it away]
• International Brotherhood of Magicians
• Intercontinental ballistic missiles

How is that for a metaphor? Investing funds (ie. time) to obtain assets (ie. knowledge), whose worth is determined by the free market. Or if you cut the bs, simply deciding which languages to learn based on knowing its current value.

The TIOBE Index is the place to be if you want respect and admiration. Surely something Yukihiro Matsumoto (on the right) is presently enjoying, as his creation, the Ruby language, is about to crack the Top 10. And we trust Japanese engineering, don’t we? If you buy Japanese electronics, you know it’s gonna be good.

TIOBE tells us that if there is one thing all those colleges and universities teaching Java can’t be accused of, it’s being business oriented. Java is the number one ‘enterprise language’ at the moment, and after 3-4 years of Java, most graduates have learnt enough about it to look for jobs in companies that don’t use it.
So, looking at TIOBE in terms of owning stock, this is my break down.

01] Java — well grounded, hope I never have to use it
02] C — familiar, only done a little hacking
03] Visual Basic — no knowledge
04] C++ — have learnt it, never used it in a project
05] PHP — quite familiar, a couple of projects
06] Perl — very basic
07] Python — very comfortable, favorite language
08] C# — meaning to start a project in it, but haven’t yet
09] Delphi — the high school years, don’t remember much anymore
10] JavaScript — always been avoiding it, not a big fan of client side scripting
…
13] Ruby — see C#
16] Lisp/Scheme — see C#, but lost interest in it after I started learning Haskell
27] Awk — barely touched
32] Bash — intermediate skills
46] Haskell — basic skills, will be seeing plenty more of it in school soon