I made a lot of good money off of perl back when I was in high school. But you might wanna investigate Ruby 1.9 at some point. Now that the dark 1.8 days are over... Oh and PLT Scheme has some lovely text processing too.
While ruby is a really great and quite powerful scripting language, it has a structure that permit (and often promotes) very bad coding practices.
If you already know enough not to forget your parenthesis and end-lines, and are not whiling to reuse variables, then you are up to a good start, and can greatly enjoy the language.
If not, you will still enjoy it quite a lot, but you will rapidly notice that it becomes quite hard to come back to a more structures and formal language, where you need to end each line with ';' and all that.
That being said, it is sad that the main application that came out off it (rails) was a mixture of really great use of the MVC model, with a touch of an unstable web "server".
Anyway, have fun, I definitely enjoyed my trip in Ruby far more than I did with Lua or Perl.
Back to the topic, when you guys say that the recipe is overpowered (yeah, doesn't make any sense for a recipe, but nevermind), did you actually come up with a cost that could be seen as good?
The biggest point about this mod is that you can use them to do pretty useless things, as well as very useful ones, so putting a high price on these would render useless some of the nice things you can do.
I mean, looking at an ASCII art version of starwars is nice, making a dozen of turtle "dance" looks fun, putting up together a turtle that crafts pickaxes on demand is useless, but fun to do anyway...
All those things would nearly disappear if the cost of the computer and turtle was too high.
Who would use turtles for early wood collection, when waiting for the resources for RC, Forestry or MFR versions, that are vastly more efficient in standard uses?
Who would code a turtle that only digs the tunnels for strip mining?
Sure, you can find some programs out there that make the turtles so powerful that when you compare its function to the costs (building and fuel), it makes it look very cheap.
But if you think about it, many people are having fun with coming up and coding a whole lot of programs, ranging from useless to very useful. The whole point of the mod is to come up with programs that suit your needs. Knowing that it is a pain to type in hundreds of lines in the ingame interface (no real copy/paste, no mouse, no ctrl+arrow, weak indentation, very small characters on screen...), pastebin is a key functionality, even for those of us that like to code their own programs, even if they end up being less efficient.
By the way, you can have a pastebin account, so that you store all your scripts on it (the mod will only post as anonymous though, so you have to do it by hand).