If you had to pick a language and learn the living hell out of it so that 4-5 years from now you'd be extremely in demand, what would that language be? Why do you think so?
Wrong mentality: you want to be able to able to pick up whatever's current or interesting or required, and do so easily because you have the experience and flexibility to do so. This means you should probably learn C, Java, some functional language, and one of Ruby or Python. Extra points for assembler, as well as Forth, Lisp, Prolog or other 'mind benders'.
That said, you can bet there will still be Java and Cobol jobs in 5 years.
In terms of more "fun" things... Ruby and Python will still be around, so will Javascript. Likewise PHP but I don't consider it much fun.
> ... so that 4-5 years from now you'd be
> extremely in demand, what ...
I can't see how that could be mistaken for talking about a spoken language, but your interpretation has certainly twisted my mind. Thank you.
To answer question I thought the OP was asking, I'd offer COBOL and ForTran. There is still a lot of legacy code out there, and fewer and fewer people who have a chance to maintain it.
Admittedly my answer didn't include anything to justify the "extremely in demand" part - my brain went into dreamland briefly.
A lot of people talk about how Chinese would be a key language to know for conducting business in the mid-to-long term, which is what I thought he was driving at. Though I imagine you need longer than 4-5 years to be useful at Chinese, as per this previous HN story - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368051
Thank you. Some really good points to think about.
However, wouldn't all this mean that one is not sure of what he/she wants to do? Shouldn't you just stick to a couple of languages and become very very good at it?
When I started programming in the late 90ies, web programming was pretty much done in Perl. PHP was just starting to gain some traction. Java too, for that matter.
The big scripting languages were Perl, Tcl and, a little bit, Python, but it wasn't terribly popular either.
That was only about 13/14 years ago, and the landscape is completely different now. This is an industry where things change, unless you go to work for a bank or something and spend 30 years doing Cobol.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadThat said, you can bet there will still be Java and Cobol jobs in 5 years.
In terms of more "fun" things... Ruby and Python will still be around, so will Javascript. Likewise PHP but I don't consider it much fun.
I'd go for Swedish, as Sweden is a really cool place I'd dearly love to spend more time in (if I could afford it :))
To answer question I thought the OP was asking, I'd offer COBOL and ForTran. There is still a lot of legacy code out there, and fewer and fewer people who have a chance to maintain it.
A lot of people talk about how Chinese would be a key language to know for conducting business in the mid-to-long term, which is what I thought he was driving at. Though I imagine you need longer than 4-5 years to be useful at Chinese, as per this previous HN story - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368051
However, wouldn't all this mean that one is not sure of what he/she wants to do? Shouldn't you just stick to a couple of languages and become very very good at it?
The big scripting languages were Perl, Tcl and, a little bit, Python, but it wasn't terribly popular either.
That was only about 13/14 years ago, and the landscape is completely different now. This is an industry where things change, unless you go to work for a bank or something and spend 30 years doing Cobol.