I want to know your opinions on the best combination of programming languages to learn if you want to learn more than one. An explanation of your choices would be real nice. I've included a multiple-choice poll that has the langauges from the Member's Choice Awards 2009 list of best programming languages on it. Please vote for your choice of languages also. It should be interesting to see what the numbers are like when people can vote this way, and choose more than one language. Thank you.
I'm voting for Python/C just as an "overall" opinion. It's what I'm going to learn. I've done quite a bit of reading and experimenting and this is what I've personally settled on. My opinion is just a personal "overall" opinion. You can also pick just a single language, and vote for just a single language if you think it's better to learn just one.

There's obviously no such thing as the "best combination", so what you'll end up with is forum members voting for their favorite languages/the languages they know/the languages they think they know/the languages they wish they'd know. As I have. I voted for C and C++, I would have also voted for assembly language (for the processor one usually works with) had this option been available.

I only voted for C, as it's basically the lingua franca of programming. For anything else, learn what'll be useful to you and what you'll learn. C is the only language I'd say would be useful* for all programmers to know.


* Note the deliberate use of useful, not necessary.

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Also, I doubt that C# will get many votes. Try running the same poll on a Windows-help-forum (or something) and you might get different results (i.e. 0 votes for "C" and the like ).

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I'm not quite sure of the value of including all the obscure languages on that list....I'm also not going to vote.

Pick one common language and learn it---then, when you need something else, learn that.

I started with Fortran 40+ years ago, then C about 25 years ago. Now I'm learning BASH and Python. (I also speak HTML+CSS)

YMMV

PS: I am not a programmer, so my opinion is basically useless......

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I copied the 2009 Member's Choice Awards language list because I'm hoping a lot of people will have an opinion and vote and it's a much different poll and interesting to see the differences between a single language poll, like the MC list, and a multi-choice poll like this.

I voted for "C" + Perl + Haskell, actually meaning OCaml instead of the latter.

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Hmmmm: its more by category/usage imho

1. C - useful for serious programming, teaches what's really happening under eg OSes, DBs, 'higher langs' see 2, 3, 4 below (see ASM for device drivers)

2. bash - for cmd line in Linux; you'll need this anyway

3. Perl - for sysadmin and easy(ier) C type stuff ; not used to write OS, DB or device drivers

4. SQL - RDBMS access; you're bound to come across this at work...

5. HTML - if you really want to understand web pages

Obviously you can substitute other langs in the categories above

C/C++, because that's basically all I know (I do know a little x86 assembly, but a) it's not enough to do anything useful, and b) it's not on your choice list )

Python and C is a decent combo, but you could probably just get away with learning only Perl.

I use bash, and a bit of C, and rarely a bit of python.

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shell
perl
C/C++

with this combination you can do just about anything.

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I've programmed with or played around with about a dozen languages. The one that has provided the most satisfactory experience so far is Ruby.

I chose C for greatest portability. I chose C++ because it is the most widely used object-oriented language. I voted for Haskel because it is the easiest functional language and because its lazy evaluation is well suited for parallelizing computation. I voted for scheme because, for the problems it works well on, it works really, really well. I voted for Lisp partly for its long history as a functional language and because it is the base language for Emacs. I chose Erlang because it is the modern pattern matching language well suited to massive parallelization of processing and the base language for some modern parsers. I also agree with posixculprit's comment about assembly languages, because you have to emit actual machine instructions eventually, and it provides insight into how the hardware works at the level of machine language.
None of these languages is well suited to every problem. Any of these languages can be proven to be able to compute any computable function. However, a Haskel solution to an appropriate problem might replace twenty pages of C code with 5 lines of Haskel.

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I'd say: Tcl/Tk and Java. Both are scripted languages. Still, they are fast enough and both are excelletn for building programs. Tcl/Tk is great for building GUI front ends, and also for 'normal' programs.
Java is the language of the future. It's the safest among the 'curly braces languages'. C and C++ are portable assemblers. And assemblers are outdated. But don't take me on my words here. C and C++ are neither assemblers nor portable. At least, not as much as the users would like them to be.

My great love in programming languages is Modula-2. It's a very safe language, like Ada, and it is certified for mission critical applications (like Ada). Alas, nobody is using it. Probably because it was made in Switzerland instead of in the US.

Java has a lot in common with C, C++ and Modula-2. It builds on the syntax of C and C++ yet has a lot of the safety issues of Modula-2 added to it. This makes the compiler type-safe. Java is cross platform and identical for every implementation. Add it all up and you have a good programming environment.

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No, TCL is not a good language because it is an interpreter. I.e. to catch all syntax errors one needs a static checker.

Perl/Python/Java/Ruby are different - they first compile.