I agree that Python is a good language to learn and to teach as an introduction. But HN isn't quite the most reflective of the job market. It's reasonably dive

I agree that Python is a good language to learn and to teach as an introduction. But HN isn't quite the most reflective of the job market. It's reasonably diverse, but how much interest does, say, .NET generate on here? Not much, but .NET seems to be becoming impossible to avoid in the Windows programming market. HN also likes languages like Lisp. Do the jobs for Lisp even compare with jobs available for Ruby? I think HN stats will give you a decent idea of powerful and/or hacker-friendly and/or elegant languages (those seem to be the favorites around here, from my perspective), which are probably good languages to use as an introduction, but not necessarily strongly correlated with market value. Again, not that I disagree with the conclusion.