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Specifically, which language is the way of the future
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Hmmm
Thats a tough one
What is the job of the future?
Pretty personal question. I dont mean that I dont want to answer because its personal, not at all... I mean there are a lot of different opinions. I'm sure if you REALLY (and I mean REALLY) you could probably find somebody to tell you FORTRAN is the language of the future
In reality it really depends on what you want to do with your coding skills. You probably wont know until you've tried a few out. If you want to get into kernel hacking in Linux you HAVE to know C/C++ (mostly C)
If you want to do GUI's in windows, you should know either
VB (easy), or Visual C++ (quite difficult)
If you want to work with databases, you'll want to learn some form of SQL (depending on what DB you choose to work with)
If you want to do web stuff, java, php, perl html, xml ...
It all depends on you
Myself, I mostly know
VB (boring, but popular language pretty easy to learn... good language to start out with if you want to do GUI's in winders)
I also really like working with Databases, so I know T-SQL. (all SQL is pretty much the same except the non standard forms like T-SQL (microsoft) and PL/SQL (Oracle) have more addtives and preservatives

. There is also a standard form of SQL that works with databases like MySQL (which is what this very site runs on) and PostgreSQL.
Oracle is another IT monolith. They are a huge database developer. Most very large sites run on Oracle most likely on a unix box. It is rock stable, and quite fast. It has a better reputation for stability, and dependability than MS's SQL Server. I actually like programming for SQL Server cause I like their GUI's... but we had some problems keeping it stable
So this should at least be a start for you

You'll find really the hardest part of learning programming is simply the fundamentals. Whats a loop, conditional statements procedural code etc. Once you've worked with it awhile you'll start noticing patterns where every language is similar. I'd suggest starting with a language (probably not SQL because they are quite a different animal than the rest) that is not overly complicated (like C++ for instance). Some people like learning with perl, as its a common language and you can get software to run on it for free (linux anyone?)
or if you have a webserver available you could learn PHP and maybe eventually put MySQL in the background (you can truely do all this nearly free if you wish, but plan on investing some time into it)
SO in reality its really up to you where you want to go
