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.