I had lunch with Eric Raymond here in Austin a 15-20 years ago, and he was lamenting the fact that he couldn't read his own Perl programs less than a year after

I had lunch with Eric Raymond here in Austin a 15-20 years ago, and he was lamenting the fact that he couldn't read his own Perl programs less than a year after writing them, so he was rewriting them all in Python. I never get religious about languages or platforms, but Python, which has been described as "executable pseudocode" does a nice job of balancing power and readbility. Idiomatic Perl is powerful, but opaque enough to be effectively unmaintainable. Since errors are pretty much proportional to LOC, it is best to use languages that offer "high leverage": Python, Tcl, and Lua come to mind. Note that C is still almost the only choice for real embedded work - it's unsurpassed at register bit-banging. (Well, except for assembly, but that requires skills that are no longer taught - interestingly, the same ones that make good embedded C programmers...)