Well a year of learning in your own time probably doesn't have that much of a cost - unless the wife leaves you because you never got round to putting those shelves up.

But then when a new version of the development software is released after that year and you have to re-invest another year learning new features and technology, along with the cost of the updgrade then it can be very expensive.

People learning to program from scratch would be better advised to use a free or cheap language - I reckon 80% of the effort involved in learning to program is to teach your brain to think in a structured way, 10% is teaching yourself to be rigourous in your testing, 5% is learning to comment and only 5% is the actual language (hope that adds up )

Once you are profeccient in one language it's fairly easy to move to another.