Proliferation of programming languages.

Maybe it's just me, but lately I'm feeling a little bewildered for our apparent need to keep inventing programming languages and frameworks. A short list, just consisting of my use, exposure, and/or interest: Machine Language, Assembly Language, Basic, Pascal, Lisp, C, Fortran, PERL, Python, TCL, C++, Java, Javascript, Spring, Ruby (on Rails), Smalltalk, Groovy, Grails, Trails, Erlang, Haskell, Scala, Clojure. Makes it challenging for someone with a short attention span to stick to one language long enough to get things. done.

What's the best first programming language.

Just got through this article on Infoworld via Slashdot. It basically discusses opinions on what is the best programming language to start with. I'm of the contention that it doesn't matter so much, what matters is if the programming language lets the new programmer do something they think is cool. If a teenager is really into some MMORPG that has a scripting language, that is what they will learn. If you earn your bread and butter crunching numbers in Excel, you've got motivation to learn VBA. It's like human languages, you normally learn only what you "need";.My daughter got pretty good with LOGO, which they taught at school, because she got to use it to draw pictures.

The Definitive Guide to Grails

This book, by Graeme Rocher and Jeff Brown, gets a big FAIL for already being out of date. My goal in picking up a tech book is to get the cookie-cutter stuff in the tutorial to work right away, and then work my way deeper, explore the capabilities, and extend as I need, later. Examples started breaking in chapter 2, in the tutorial.
On the one hand, Grails is evolving quickly, so it is understandable that the book gets out of date. On the other hand, dropping $45 for a book where the basic tutorial doesn't work in six months means it's a bit premature to be writing books on the subject, that sort of content should probably be in a wiki that gets updated as the project evolves.

Perl Modules

After not touching it for a while, I was looking to explore PERL again for webapps. Here's my problem. If I want to use a single interesting looking PERL module, it seems like I need to install the entire contents of CPAN. If all this stuff is so necessary, why isn't it bundled with the core distribution?