If you want to really be well versed in programming techniques, it's worth learning a statically-typed functional language -- Haskell, OCaml, SML, or similar. T

If you want to really be well versed in programming techniques, it's worth learning a statically-typed functional language -- Haskell, OCaml, SML, or similar. This will teach you techniques you won't commonly see anywhere else. I wouldn't say you need to learn one of these, but I wouldn't say you need to know Matlab, or Lisp/Scheme either. Just that learning different programming styles will make you a better programmer. Prolog and Erlang reputedly have this property as well, but they're still in my to-learn queue, so I can't speak first hand about them. Also, unless you never plan on going near the web, JavaScript is pretty much a necessity these days.