I'm also a working professional. But the computers that interfaced with anything going into space were Linux, and for good reason, not a single non-custom program ever got use on those machines. I miss those days.
If you're writing software, there is no environment now nor or in the future that will compare to Linux and the BSDs, because they were written by guys like you for guys like you. If you're a syadmin there's no environment now nor in the future that will compare to Linux and the BSDs, because they were written by guys like you for guys like you. If you're a scientist writing software, there' is no envornment now nor in the future that will compare to Linux and the BSDs, because they care at least in principal about guys like you and everyone else cares about marketshare. For the time being, artist still count as "marketshare". Give it a few years before Apple stops caring about users who produce anything at all and watch Photoshop get ported to Linux, Pantone relax its licensing enough that Gimp doesn't have to lag behind and kleinbl00 mellowing a bit as less artificial stress filters down to him.
From your lips to Adobe's ears. I've been saying for a year now that the most expedient solution for all players is for Adobe to buy Avid, throw away Audition and PT First, and make Pro Tools, AfterFX and Symphony interoperable as part of CC for Linux. That you can't do rendering on a Beowulf cluster is one of the biggest missteps in creative post.
Fourth gen proprietary language, mostly, here. Sad. Can you guess which one? Wrote a bitchin' 4chan [edit: that fuckup deserves to stay and haunt me forever] simulation last year right about now, implicit none'd it! Used Fortran 95, but I've debugged some 77 code before, NEVER AGAIN. Yeah, I just gotta get in, get out, and get on with my life right now. There's no time to optimize workflow, this is grad school, the aim is that the exact opposite thing happens. And April? April is Fuck am_Unition Especially Hard Month, and it ain't the good fuckin' type of fucking. I'm halfway on Hubski to vent; I know this consciously. Sorry, Hubski/bfv. Thanks for listening to me bitching, my girlfriend appreciates it tomorrow. I dunno what my cybers will look like in a few years. I'm on a 2012 Macbook Pro. I just updated iOS for the first time in two years last week, as the boot process had grown longer than two hours. Writing code has been very rewarding for me. I enjoy it, naturally.
Mostly IDL, who cares, the syntax differences are minor squabbles. Both are child's play, for people working in C or what have you. Which is appropriate, as I am a child. What do you write in, I've gleaned you're netsec? Black-hat, for sure, colluding around these parts...