What language(s) do you already know? I'm also a fan of the Pragmatic Programmer and my lifetime language count is at 15. A few years ago I started using Groov

What language(s) do you already know? I'm also a fan of the Pragmatic Programmer and my lifetime language count is at 15. A few years ago I started using Groovy and haven't looked back. Very low ceremony language that gets rid of a ton of Java boilerplate. Borrows idioms/semantics from Ruby and Python, esp. list processing (collect, map, find/findAll, etc.), making those languages easier to learn. There's good library support, even outside of Grails, but Grails plugins are a big win. And assuming you want to be on the JVM to interact with other Java libs, Groovy makes this trivial. I also love the optional static typing and compilation, which greatly improves performance. I usually recommend people look at the style guide (http://www.groovy-lang.org/style-guide.html http://www.groovy-lang.org/style-guide.html) and the GDK (http://www.groovy-lang.org/groovy-dev-kit.html http://www.groovy-lang.org/groovy-dev-kit.html). Pretty short reads that get you up to speed on much of the functionality quickly. If you like what you see, keep going. I haven't felt motivated to learn anything new since this meets my needs so well, but if it had better library/framework support I'd give Clojure a shot. I enjoyed Lisp, but didn't use it outside the classroom except for Emacs. Probably learn it with SICP.