Decisions, decisions. I’m trying to write a small program to help my son learn to do subtraction. (His problem–today–is borrowing, which these days is called “regrouping.”) It is a trivial sort of GUI program and I’m trying to decide whether to learn Java UI programming with Swing, or Ruby/Tk. Swing has the advantage of including anything I could ever possibly need and working out of box. Ruby/Tk isn’t nearly as all-encompassing … but … let’s face it: Ruby is 10x the language that Java will ever be. (Hence groovy.)

Update: I never got around to this and he figured out how to subtract. Sort of. But it’s interesting to see all the hype about Ruby (due to Rails) and watch the Java types freak out about it.