I agree that you should broaden your horizons. It gives important perspective, and makes your mind a lot bigger. There's more than one way to do it, of course,

I agree that you should broaden your horizons. It gives important perspective, and makes your mind a lot bigger. There's more than one way to do it, of course, but here's a sequence of languages that I would recommend: Python: this will teach you to program at a higher level, and the libraries will make it easier for you to get into web programming or GUI programming or simple game programming or any other thing that excites you. That's what it's all about, when you're learning: do something that excites you, and you'll learn faster. Python has a very low barrier to entry, so try this first. Lisp: once you know Python, you're not going to be bowled over by things like garbage collection. But you can still learn a lot from Lisp; if nothing else, it can give valuable practice with recursion and metaprogramming and the idea of a read-eval-print loop. It's a cool and fun language. Haskell: this one is kind of difficult to learn, which is why I recommend learning it after you've got Lisp under your belt. A lot of advanced computer science stuff tends to debut in the Haskell community, and the average intelligence of Haskellers is pretty shocking. It's also a neat language that you can do cool projects with. If you can learn these languages, I guarantee that you will be able to shift paradigms a lot easier than people who coasted along with the standard trio of C, C++, and Java.