Ask HN: What language will be most useful in 5 years?
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?
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.
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 :))
> ... so that 4-5 years from now you'd be
> extremely in demand, what ...
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.