The most useful programming language

As a freshman in soc who might be new to programming like me, some of you might wonder what is the most useful programming language to learn. As we are constantly in pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness, we hope we can find one or two such languages from which we can conquer the world of computing science. It is not hard to find the ranking on the Internet like which claims that “Among thousands, 10 programming languages stand out for their job marketability and wide use. If you're looking to boost your career or learn something new, start here. ” (cite from 9 Programming Languages You Should Learn Right Now by Rothberg)
1. PHP
2. C#
3. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
4. JavaScript
5. Perl
6. C
7. Ruby and Ruby on Rails
8. Java
9. Python
However, if you are following this, you are doing it wrong. Why do I say so? Today technologies are developing at an amazing speed and therefore any programming turn from being populous to being outdated in a shorter and shorter time span. For example, all of those so called “useful” languages — Java, PHP, Ruby, have first appeared in 1995, which means that all the hype that you are supposed to ”know” right now, didn’t even exist just 13 years ago.(Tony, 2008)
In other words, you will never be fast enough to catch up “the fashion”. In contrast, what remain unchanged are the core abstracts, ideas, and skills that are language independent, and that transfer from one syntax to another, like Algorithms, data structures, complexity and math. With these, whenever a new opportunity with new technology comes along, we should be able to get over the learning curve fairly quickly.
That explains why Haoqiang and I are doing the quite outdated “scheme” instead of going to the mainstream of Java. We will talk more in our presentation “Scheme-managing complexity” tomorrow. I hope this passage is helpful to you.