When I was in engineering school, I came to the esoteric conclusion that everything can be boiled down to "energy and time", where "power is the energy available per unit of time". Later, I came to add "information" as "patterns in the energy" Perl is the best tool I've come across for manipulating "information" . I'm not the best at it, but I love it. All I want for Christmas, is a language with the ease of Perl, but compiles to elf. (OK, maybe add a visual IDE for GTK which auto-writes the callbacks. Maybe that can wait for next Christmas).