best languages to learn as a newcomer
loch_ness_350: Clojure is a great, powerful language. I would start with that-- it's a Lisp that runs on the JVM, so it has access to all the Java libraries. It can become semi-fast if you drop down to Java, but by the time you care about performance down to orders of binary magnitude, you should probably switch to Ocaml and use Lacaml for numerical stuff.