Okay, this is fairly far off-topic, but in my experience, most modern shops want either C, Visual C++, or Java experience. At the same time, if one is a competent programmer, it shouldn't take very long to become competent with a new language. But if you've never programmed before, I have a few notions about what you should start with. I've always believed that Pascal was a wonderful teaching language for the same reasons that it's a lousy real-world language. You get to learn the concepts of algorithms without having to worry about a bunch of underlying crap that is irrelevant to what you're trying to learn. On the other hand, it will not be directly useful to you in real life. C is not a horrible learning language, as it's very static. That is, there are not a dozen ways to do the same thing, so it's easy to decide which way to go. And it's, by far, the most common language for writing Unix applications. [religion]C++ is a horrible language in almost every aspect[/religion], but if you want to program for Windows, you'd better learn it. Regardless, it's a horrible language to learn basic programming with. Java is, for the most part, a nice language, excluding the fact that you have to run Java programs within a virtual machine. There are a few native compilers here and there, but they're not as common as they ought to be. Note that Pascal and C are procedural languages and Java is an object-oriented language and C++ is a bizarre amalgam of procedure and object-orientation. I'd suggest starting with a procedural language, as it seems the most straightforward to me, whereas object-oriented languages help programmers who already know what they're doing and are trying to reutilize code as much as possible, but that's far more personal opinion than the rest of this postulate.