I would tend to agree with most of the previous posts. C and its spawn are still very important and must be learned. Additionally, M$'s release of .NET should not be dismised, for better or for worse, M$ is extremely important, especially in business. The propaganda on the .NET development environment is that it levels the programming field as a result of using an intermediate compiler that takes various languages (C, JAVA, FORTRAN, etc...) to a common language (prior to compiling the code to machine code) [cough cough overhead cough cough]. The idea being that this would allow various programmers who know different languages to work together on the same project. It is my opinion that C is probably the best to start of on as good C programmers generally has a better understanding of the nuts and bolts of programming as it hides less of the routines that are generally done behind the scenes in languages like JAVA and C++. Therefore, a good C programmer will generally produce much "tighter" code than someone who started on a more "friendly" language - I have personally seen a great deal of this among among JAVA coders who because the language has automatic "garbage collection" produce really messy code because they do not think about memory handling when writing a program. Finally, once you have a firm grasp on one language it is easy to pick up other that are similar (e.g. C++, C#, VS C, Java, etc.).