what OS to use?

[hottweelz]

Oh great, another battle of the fanboys. Speaketh not the name of Jobs in vain lest thou incur the fearsome wrath of His mighty army. Handbags at dawn is the only solution, this battle has been fought many times and the outcome is always the same, all OS's have their failings so they're all crap (except BeOS of course).

I installed BeOS once... it was ... cute.

[saddambitcoin]

if i may refocus the thread here - what would be the best programming language to learn first, something that would apply well to osx and bitcoin ideally?

[gweedo]

if i may refocus the thread here - what would be the best programming language to learn first, something that would apply well to osx and bitcoin ideally?

Learn java, to get the concepts, then you probably want to learn objective-c after that. Objective-C is hard to start off out of the gate with. It is what native mac apps are written in. Also their are object-c libraries to do JSON-RPC calls so it isn't that hard to tie to bitcoind or bitcoin-qt.

[saddambitcoin]

thanks gweedo, stan - very helpful.  i think i will start with this MIT ocw course i found here: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00sc-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-spring-2011/

i don't really know what i want to do with the knowledge, but i have the interest and enough free time at the moment to put the effort in. 

[ErnestoJuarell]

Java and C# are verbose,easy, and safe. You could check out lua or even javascript if you wanna use something like Unity to make a game. Python is nice and usable but some things can be too cryptic for beginners.