I look through the comments here and it seems a lot of people are unhappy, displeased, confused, or otherwise negative about the rankings of languages in the list. As someone that is seriously considering going to graduate school to update my programming skills I'd like to know where I could get the best return on my investment.
I did VHDL and Verilog primarily for a few years. As is the nature of the beast there was some mix of programming in a lot of other languages that went with that to make tools work, add in existing legacy code, or accommodate the preferences of co-workers and managers. Some that come to mind are C/C++, shell scripting, PHP, Python, Perl, XML/HTML, and JavaScript. I came across some MatLab, tk/TCL, and Fortran but I didn't have to know the language but know it was there, how to run the code, and who to talk to when it broke.
I did some development on MAMP, LAMP, and WIMP systems off and on over the years. This meant using SQL, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and since the development platform I was using was a Mac I had to know some shell scripting, AppleScript, and probably one or two more I've since forgotten.
Wanting to get back into web development I'm considering classes on Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, and HTML5. I'd probably also brush up my knowledge of C/C++ and Java since they see unavoidable as both a computer science student and someone in the real world of programming just about anything. Old code for web pages will very likely have C++ and Java in them that need to be reused or replaced with something newer, faster, and more compatible.
A masters in computer science program means taking about 10 three credit courses to get the degree. That means learning potentially 10 different languages. Which 10 would you choose? Which of those 10 are a must to learn, which would be merely advantageous to know?
I thought I had my mind made up on which classes to take but reading the fine article and some of the comments here leads me to think I may need to reconsider my priorities. What shold my priorities be?