Over at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2016415,00.asp#talkback they are (were!) discussing which languages a programmer should learn. They back it up with how many jobs are available in each language which sounds like a pretty good test. What might be better is how many people are employed in each language - maybe there are 2000 jobs in Perl because it’s crap to use and everyone knows they’ll be no jobs in 2 years so why learn it?

My money would be on C/C++ for development, PHP for the web and Python for scripting and to get experience with as many different environments and IDE’s as possible.

Intelligence is not a matter of how quickly you learn but how quickly you re-learn.

Flexibility = employment  - as the contortionist said to the bishop (or was that the other way round?).