Commentary on a bunch of languages (Score 1, Insightful)

C: Overcomplicated, but fast, and useful for extending most other languages

Java: Reasonable, but a bit wordy. Pretty marketable. Performs quite reasonably really, though slow to exec

C++:Probably best avoided unless you have libraries in C++ you must use (in which case you could use Cython)

Objective-C: Useless, except on an iPhone

C#: Another lockin trojan horse from Microsoft. Avoid.

PHP: Awful design. Avoid.

BASIC: Those whom the gods would destroy, first they teach BASIC.

Python: Very nice language to work in. Sacrifices performance a bit in the reference implementation, but pretty fast if you use Pypy. Can be extended using C or Cython. Sometimes off-putting to people who feel that programming "should be complicated".

JavaScript: The assembly language of the web. It's a bit of a mess, but many, many web applications use it. There have been many projects attempting to translate other languages to JavaScript, to make web development less painful. One of them is Python, another is Java. I'd be surprised if there aren't others.

Perl:What a mess! It's much too kitchen-sink. For people whose problem domains aren't complicated enough to keep them entertained, so they need a messy language to make things more interesting.

Ruby:Popular among Java programmers who don't want to use anything but Java. Kinda perlish, but not quite as bad.