Choose the domain first and then the language. Decide what type of programming do you want to do and what type of company do you want to work for. Then choose

Choose the domain first and then the language. Decide what type of programming do you want to do and what type of company do you want to work for. Then choose the biggest or hottest language / framework in that domain. Do you want to do science and R&D? Then maybe Matlab, R, OpenCL/Cuda? Finance? Maybe F#. Big Data and statistics? R, Hive, Scope, Pig, Cascading, DryadLinq, Clojure. Web front-end? Javascript. Web back-end? Javascript, Python or Ruby. Mobile? Objective-C or MonoTouch. Games? Lua. Etc, etc.