my list is pretty different. i'm gonna totally exclude the functional language category. functional languages can do some really cool things and some people swe

my list is pretty different. i'm gonna totally exclude the functional language category. functional languages can do some really cool things and some people swear by them, but none of them are things that you should know for professional purposes. a low level language - C is the most important one by a million miles a high level enterprise oriented language - Java or C# a high level scripting language - Python, Ruby, Perl Unix Shell Scripting (bash is the most popular i guess) the frontend web stack - HTML/CSS/JavaScript obviously people will have widely varying degrees of proficiency between those categories, but everyone should be at least familiar with those categories if not an expert in all of them. you probably should be an expert in one of them though. having a "native tongue" is a useful thing.