best languages to learn as a newcomer
baguasquirrel: Try a small diverse set of languages?  Here's an interesting anecdote for you.  I have two friends from CMU, both who have a CS degree.  The first person was an ace at C.  Could handle everything with ease, but faltered a bit when it came to ML/Haskell.  The second person managed to screw up the "easy" C class, but she scrubbed off ML/Haskell as if it were trivial, but hated all other programming classes she took.  At the time of this writing, the second person is on equal or greater footing than the first person, and both are in industry.Whether because of personality or because of the actual underlying mental thinking involved, people who tend to be good at C aren't good at Matlab or Haskell, and folks who are good at Matlab aren't necessarily good at either C or Haskell.In light of this, I think it'd be really sad if your friend tried just one language, and wrote off programming forever because it was a bad experience.