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Ajay and I were talking at the Dyalog 25th birthday celebrations last
month about how we couldn't get our work done these days without a
handful of languages. Our days of trying to get everything done in APL
are long gone.

That said, it costs time to master a language or technology, and
frequent use to keep fluent. It makes sense to be conservative.

Is there a 'sweet spot' in the technology plane? Which small group of
languages and technologies best covers the ground these days? (Of
course, we don't all work quite the same patch of ground.) What would
you have an apprentice master?

Moi? Can't live without Dyalog, HTML & CSS, XML & XSL-T. These have
all repaid study and IMHO are worth learning in depth.

I might make a case for either XSL-FO or DocBook ML; not clear to me
yet. (I think I'm handing back my black belt in Microsoft Word, after
having used it from V1.0 on the Mac and PC.)

Dan Baronet makes a strong case for RegEx, a good example IMO of a
'use it or lose it' technology.

Are there also essential technologies one should avoid mastering? That
is, learn what one must and use sparingly? Some candidates:

 * PHP is invaluable for a little server-side scripting on web sites,
but I'd hate to go deep. (Morten & I are chasing a little dream there
about an ultralight website model in Dyalog. Could a workspace be a
'website in a box'?)

 * Can't live without a little Javascript for browser scripting. Stay
with that, or go for mastery?

 * SQL: with ample memory these days it seems OK to run only simple
queries and do hard sums in Dyalog.

 * VB is ubiquitous for Excel, but I'm stubbornly stupid about it. Do
I effing HAVE to? My teeth hurt.

Dave "Pragmatic" Thomas recommends choosing one good text editor and
using it for everything. I've been happy with IDM's UltraEdit for a
while. So that would give me a bit more from RegEx or Javascript (UE's
scripting language).

Lastly, studying J a little has influenced how I write and think in
Dyalog, even though I haven't taken up J as a working tool. I suspect
studying Lisp might have a similar effect. (Ruby didn't; but perhaps I
didn't go far enough?) What languages are worth study even if unlikely
to become part of one's working toolset? (Stefano, it doesn't help to
say "all of them". ;-)  )

SJT
editor@[EMAIL PROTECTED]