I disagree. Your advice holds for someone already in a career. For a student they definitely should learn a language based on external factors (marketability of

I disagree. Your advice holds for someone already in a career. For a student they definitely should learn a language based on external factors (marketability of the skill, ubiquity, applicability to other languages, etc). To the OP, Java is a great language for students to learn. It's OOP through and through (with the exception of primitive types). It's probably a prerequisite on more job ads than any other language (at least outside the HN microcosm). It allows you to discover a whole world of Java tools and libraries. Any language you transition to will have a whole audience of people moving to it from Java/C and language designers take this into consideration for their syntax. You could spend the rest of your career writing Java, but there are certainly much better ways to write webapps now--but those ways only came about after every fortune 500 company built up a huge Java stock.