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[b]The Object of the Game[/b]
The object of the game is to “bear off” all of your checkers from the backgammon board before your opponent. Each player can prevent the other from advancing. The object of the game is the same whether you play face-to-face or online.

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This gets to your larger point, ie, if you want to learn modern Hebrew or Swedish, in order for them to be useful you need to speak them better than Swedish or Israeli waiters’ English, which is a high bar. And it does seem that the odds of writing programs well enough to overcome the bar of “already out there and free or cheap” is the same — if you really need to communicate with a Swede, just speak English or find any other Swede to translate. On the other linguistic extreme would be something like Chinese, where just learning the characters for bathroom or your bus stop would be useful every day. I think systems programming, the low level stuff, is maybe like Swedish, but the high-level dynamic languages are like an extreme version of Chinese; every time you learn something like BeautifulSoup or Feedparser it is permanently and frequently useful, without having to know pointer arithmetic or whatever.

On the broader issue: those for whom the costs of learning even rudimentary coding greatly exceed yours (since you have a background, etc.) still have a reasonable outlet: tools like Yahoo Pipes promise to let you do at least a little bit of interesting mashing without having to get your hands too dirty with actual code.

I haven’t used them, and can’t speak to the quality of the particular tools available today, but an awful lot of smart people are working in that space, and sooner or later someone is going to get it right.

(Though, conversely, things like that are always going to hit a point of diminishing returns, since ultimately the skill in programming isn’t knowing the magic incantations but rather understanding logic, abstractions and the like… hence why “business rules systems” designed to let “business analysts” codify rules in something that resembles-but-isn’t-quite a programming language invariably fail).

More prosaically, let me put in a vote for Python. It’s not a language I know or even like that much, but it’s clearly the one you should tackle if you’re going to try to pick up a scripting language right now. PHP is web-bound for a variety of reasons — it can be forced to do the sorts of long-form computation that I suspect you’ll wind up wanting to do, but it’s not ideal for it. And it really is a disgusting mutt of a language, born of convenience and tacked-on bits rather than a deliberate philosophy. You might consider Ruby, too, although the web seems to be falling out of love with Ruby at the moment (and there are market reasons for expecting Python to grow in prominence in the short term).