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David_Allen comments on What is the best programming language? - Less Wrong
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Learning multiple programming languages will broaden your perspective and will make you a better and more flexible programmer over time.
If you are new and learning on your own, you should focus on one language at a time. Pick a project to work on and then pick the language you are going to use. I like to code a Mandelbrot set image generator in each language I learn.
If you make your dollars only from the finished product, then pick the language with the highest productivity for your target platform and problem domain. This will probably be a garbage collecting language with a clean syntax, with a good integrated development environment, and with a large available set of libraries.
Right now this will probably be Python, Java or C#.
If you make your dollars by producing lines of code for a company, then you will want to learn a language that is heavily used. There is generally a large demand for C++, C#, Java, Python, and PHP programmers. Companies in certain domains will focus on other languages like Lisp, Smalltalk and Ada.
No single language will do this in the long run, but you might take temporary advantage of the current rise of Python, or the large install base of Java and C++.
For a broad basic education I suggest:
If you want to do web-related development:
If you want to do engineering related development:
One way to do this is by writing small C programs and looking at the assembler a compiler generates e.g. by calling
gccwith-S. (You can also use this to get some understanding of the optimisations a compiler performs by comparing the difference between the assembler with optimisations and the assembler with full optimisations.)As you do this, you should also start replacing bits of the C code with inline assembler that you have written yourself, since writing code is better than just reading code.
(Also, the DPCU16 from the yet-to-be-released game 0x10^c might be a reasonable way to learn the basics of assembly languages: there are even numerous online emulators, e.g. 0x10co.de)