¿Qué lenguaje aprender?

En un Foro de ARCGIS, de ESRI, un usuario preguntó que lenguaje le convenía aprender para poder realizar las sugerencias a su pregunta sobre Geodatabase. A continuación, la respuesta de Vangelo:

Should you learn programming? Yes -- It's never an unwise move to become more technically literate.

Which language is more like a religious question. I'm fluent in over a dozen languages, and have dabbled in a dozen more, yet I'm still not available to work projects in yet another dozen languages. I'd recommend getting solid understanding in at least one object-oriented language (Java, C#, C++, Python), plus one non-OO language (like 'C' and the dozens of scripting languages), plus SQL, and the various flavors of data representation (especially XML).