From: Dauntless Hunter | #018
C# is Microsoft's C++/Java variant. I don't know if it ever really took off that well, but I do know it's what you write games in for XNA.
One language I hear a lot about these days is Python. Seems like that's on the rise. Also Ruby on Rails, but not as much. And of course PHP is huge.
For my money, I'd do everything in Perl if I could.
But a lot of what makes a "good" language to learn depends on what kind of development you want to do.
Java/C/C++ are meant for applications and Perl/Python/PHP are in a special class of programming languages called 'scripting languages' which are executed in a completely different way. They also have a wide variety of purposes that spans over something that C/C++ should never really get into and vice versa. Every job requires a different tool, as they say.