Confused semi-newbie programmer needs some advice.
gord: Well your coming to that realization 15 years earlier than I did.  I developed commercial apps in C/C++ and only recently have discovered lisp and other related languages, and just find them to be much more enjoyable to think and hack in.If you want an absolute mind blowing trip, grab a copy of scheme or a lisp variant such as Clojure [hip at the moment].. and work through SICP - 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' the classic course by abelson and sussman of MIT.You can download the lecture videos and the full course is online.  Seeing how they introduced lisp programs to calculate derivatives and do symbolic algebra was awe inspiring.Language does matter : Python Ruby Haskell.. all respectable, but Id go to the source for some subtleties you'd enjoy - lisp is probably the foundation of all computer languages in some mathematical sense.