If you're a member of my tribe, you should definitely read A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Computer Languages.
A couple gems:
1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.
and
1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
and of course
1980 - Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term "object oriented." When asked what that means he replies, "Smalltalk programs are just objects." When asked what objects are made of he replies, "objects." When asked again he says "look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles."
bloody brilliant! I may have mentioned my short-lived infatuation for computer programming. (I gave it up because I realized it didn't require you to do math, but it did require you to be able to play chess well, and I couldn't.) I learned a little Java, a little Perl. Basic at that point was mostly Visual Basic, and I certainly wasn't a masochist enough to try to learn Fortan or Cobol. I tried C and C++. C++ is Frankenstein's monster. C is an elegant, rather pretty language that gives you so few restrictions that you're really bound to shoot yourself in the foot. What's your favorite? You're probably good enough to use C.
I've been good enough to use C, but I'm now old enough and smart enough not to. ;)
For the last 6 or 8 years, my favorite has been perl. It's astonishing how quickly you can make stuff happen with it.