Excellent points. To echo many others, it depends on what you want. If you like Python, you can be a easily be a professional Python programmer and learn othe

Excellent points. To echo many others, it depends on what you want. If you like Python, you can be a easily be a professional Python programmer and learn other languages only to get a different perspective. You can make a career successfully with Python alone and it is as real (though perhaps less traditional) as any other language. If on the other hand your goal is to learn programming in depth, I would first start with C to get a better feeling for how things work on a low level and I would then start moving on to representatives of different paradigms (a solidly oop language, a functional language, perhaps a domain specific language like SQL or two.) If your goal is to get a job and be employable, I would learn VB.NET. It is in high demand(at least in the area I am in) and if you know it then learning C# (also in fairly high demand here) is practically effortless.