In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
I'm curious what the go-to languages are these days, in your opinion. I have a programming background (high school and the local community college) but have spent the last 15 years in networking and servers. I've done some scripting in Perl and really enjoyed it. I've got Python on my todo list. What else do you think might be worth a look?

>> ^ChaosEngine:

Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.


I guess it depends on what you want to create. For windows apps, it's hard to go past C# for front or back end. For web based stuff, Ruby or php. Python is really useful and if you want something to really change the way you look at programming, Haskell or LISP. Java is still quite popular, but I personally never warmed to it.

And then, of course there's objective-c for iOS.

@enoch & @IAmTheBlurr: Spiral dynamics is not for everyone... and there is very little empiricism to back it up because the bases upon which the different levels are concerned have not been qualitatively elucidated sufficiently enough to study them, to say nothing of the scientific method, itself, as being contingent upon certain assumptions within a given level of consciousness and not others.

However, if you were to adopt the philosopher, Hans Vaihinger's postulate of "As If," you may find a utility of the theoretical orientation which extends beyond its empirical accuracy. That is to say, "So what if it's bullshit, so long as it's useful?" This goes for many of the theories that are widely used in the social sciences, including Abe Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" among others.

That said, we should note that none of this "spiral dynamics" theory is very original. The concept of the "evolution of consciousness" is itself the basis of much of early Vedas in Hinduism which are nearly 5 thousand of years old.. However, the theory has become more codified in the 20th century by mystics and scholars such as Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Clare Graves, Edward Haskell, Arthur Young, Erich Jantsch, Jean Gebser, and, most recently, by Ken Wilber.

Of these, I'd have to say the following books are worth reading:

Aurobindo's The Life Divine & Synthesis of Yoga
de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man
Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin
Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

(partly because I haven't read the others' works)