Seriously, get down low, and go up a few notches gradually. I mean, learn SOME assembly of some sort. It doesn't really matter if you never WRITE assembly, but

Seriously, get down low, and go up a few notches gradually. I mean, learn SOME assembly of some sort. It doesn't really matter if you never WRITE assembly, but learn how a processor works at the very least. Pick whatever is you fancy, pick AVR (8 bits Atmel) that will give you more knowledge about how a processor works than 90% of most commercial programmers worldwide. Oh and be fluent in C -- you might not like it, you might despise it, you might think whatever you might think of it, but you will find 10 examples of anything in C for any programming problem you have. Basically it's like being able to read/write Ancient Egyptian when finding a stone with wierd symbols on in the desert. Then do a small run on how compiler works (you know some assembly, and you know some C now to match) from then you can infer how an interpreter works, and even infer how a JIT works. You'll get to understand how the Javascript in your browser actually /works/ -- that's more than what 99.9999999999% of the population will ever know :-) Then feel free to play with other languages, quite frankly, I'd suggest not getting enamoured with one in particular. Ultimately, they are all the same. Make sure you understand how a garbage collector works, how dynamic loading of libraries works, and more generally, how the operating systems works -- no need to get in details. Just ^^^ THAT makes you more knowledgeable than many people throwing O-n's problems around the place.