You're asking (or implying) a lot of different questions here. Is is expedient for a young person entering the job market to be familiar with Java (I'm changin

You're asking (or implying) a lot of different questions here. Is is expedient for a young person entering the job market to be familiar with Java (I'm changing this to a positive formation becasue negatives are confusing)? Of course. The TIOBE index answers this is two seconds. Java has over 18% market share, the most of any language. Is there any excuse not to know Java? Of course. You don't care about the 18% of the market that uses Java. I think I could be happy knowing just Python most of the time. To answer some more implicit questions: Will learning Java affect the way you think about programming? Java is a great place to learn about unit testing, DI, and design patterns. The value of these is of course up for debate, but knowledge is power, and Java gives you a great chance to get this knowledge. Ultimately, I think it's better if you move on to more expressive languages, but Java is a good platform to learn some stuff on. Should you know a lot of languages? Yes. While you may not need Java specifically, not knowing any C-like object-oriented language is not only career suicide, it's detrimental to your development as a programmer.