You really need to grok C and understand Lisp. Learning just these two well, will give you most of the foundation you're ever gonna need. Nearly every other PL

You really need to grok C and understand Lisp. Learning just these two well, will give you most of the foundation you're ever gonna need. Nearly every other PL is a bunch of accretions on top of one of these; sometimes those accretions are great improvements, and more often than you'd think - they are downgrades. Lisp can teach you everything about what logically a program is, how computation itself can be expressed - code as data, recursion, and abstraction built from almost nothing, and C can teach you what a program physically is - memory, pointers, and how the machine actually runs it. I have gone through over a dozen of different PLs, each time thinking that my skillset was improving but I still sucked at it, and just needed to learn yet another language to truly get better at programming. Turns out, I just needed to grok Lisp. Don't be like me, don't waste your lives wandering around, following a map everyone's holding. Majority not only can be wrong, but as history teaches us - it is wrong most of the time. Instead, follow those few that are looking for shortcuts. They may not have most popular opinions, but they might be on the right path after all.