public class Ennui?

For about the fourth time since 1994 I’m dip­ping my toes in the waters of learn­ing Java. I have it in my head that I may be able to mar­ket myself more effec­tive­ly with Java expe­ri­ence than with Perl. Yes, I believe every­thing I’ve heard about Python being The Best Lan­guage Ev4R, but I’m pret­ty much con­vinced that it being so good is its death knell. The endorse­ment of so many savvy peo­ple puts Python in a won­der­ful club with tech­nolo­gies no one remem­bers, like OS/2 and the Apple Newton.

So am I cyn­i­cal? Yeah. But there’s more to my desire to learn Java. In addi­tion to the stuff I do for a liv­ing, I’d like to toy around with pro­gram­ming for hand­held devices. That just seems fun to me. From what I’ve seen, there’s not a lot of sup­port for lan­guages I know (Perl, and um… should I admit to hav­ing expe­ri­ence with For­tran and Rexx?) on the Palm.

I got myself a copy of O’Reil­ly’s Learn­ing Java and Kernighan & Pike’s The Prac­tice of Pro­gram­ming as learn­ing aids for notch­ing my mea­ger pro­gram­ming skills up a step or two. From Learn­ing Java’s descrip­tion of classes:

In an appli­ca­tion, a class might rep­re­sent some­thing con­crete, such as a but­ton on a screen or the infor­ma­tion in a spread­sheet, or it could be some­thing more abstract, such as a sort­ing algo­rithm or per­haps the sense of ennui in a char­ac­ter in a role-play­ing game.

Now I can’t stop won­der­ing how to pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly define ennui.