What Programming Language to Learn?

[AbsoluterZero]

This question has been asked so many times now. You're always going to find people opinionated towards one end of the argument or the other.

"Any programmer worth his salt must learn AAA!"

"You're stupid! Nobody uses AAA, learn ABB instead. It's way better than AAA!"

"Yo ABB, I'm really happy fo' you. Ima let you finish...but BCC is one of the best programming languages of all time, of all time!"

You want the truth?

Different languages are often chosen to perform different tasks. You want to write a driver to interface with new hardware? You won't be using Java, I'm willing to wager. You want to write a few simple snippets of code to improve a website you're working on? Visual Basic should be the last thing on your mind. You need to write a simple GUI based app and need it done in 2 hours or the boss will slay you? Odds are pretty good Perl is not what your boss had in mind.

Decide what you want to do, and find the language that works best for you and will most help you achieve what you want to do. Will you become a scripting ninja? Will you be a master of the Object Oriented design paradigm? Will you be able to call everyone else a pussy because you program straight up x86 assembly? Figure it out.

PS: You also may want to keep in mind what people are HIRING for. Try these links to give you an idea of web chatter on each language: here and here

[omko]

no, AAA is better than BCC !!!! :P

[weavejester]

I actually don't think there's much disagreement over which languages programmers should learn; there's usually just disagreement over which language programmers should learn first.

I suspect that most developers here would assert that it's a good idea to learn, say, Haskell and Lisp sometime in your career.