Languages

These days im loath to learn a new language. Oh not french or german or even kannada , a programming language. While wondering whether i should pick up a scripting language (python , ruby or groovy .. perls out ) i noted the distinct lack of enthusiasm in myself. It was not always this way.
My first brush with a programming language was BASIC. This was in stanislaus , all i remember was not understanding algorithms or loops too well and getting by with my ever reliable memory to write out programs ad verbatim. The next time was PASCAL in engineering. It was fun. I did well , my programs were copied. Second semester it was the turn of C. Initially we all complained. Why in the world does C have to be so terse?. But within a month I loved it. No going back to pascal ever. And there began an affair with curly brackets. We discovered the world of graphics programming. We (irwin and i) won a programming contest. Us electronic engineers. Twice. And we should have won another (Quine mcluskey). and we didnt care. we had fun programming. Winning the contest wasnt important though the first one did give us lots of satisfaction. Then C++ even though it was out of syllabus. From trying to figure out what method should go into which class to a secret revealed by one computer science student. Everything is an class. The zen of OOP. Then out of college and into work. Time to use what we have learnt for four years . Time to program in Visual Basic!. Wow look i have a functional form in 2 minutes. Look intellisense . Look i drag and drop that table and the code is generated. To time to work on a project, lets put those VB skills to use in ASP!. Explain to me again, this Javascript thats client side, this vbscript thats server side ? To i dont care what you do , it should look good on screen. Time to polish up those CSS , HTML, DHTML skills. To sending messages over MSMQ using VC++ , to ATL and Raw COM and Office VBA. Whats that you know encryption? Your just the person we need for our java project. But i dont know java, thats ok everythings a class. To JSP and EJB and JDBC and JMS and an occassional servlet. To hearing oh XML is like HTML only better. To learning XSLT and XSD in spare time.
And then 7 years of work does take its toll
Ruby, Rails , Python , Groovy , Perl, C# etc etc. BAH! I have an application to deliver