What would I recommend learning?

   – C

   – Prolog

   – Erlang (I’m biased)

   – Smalltalk

   – Javascript

   – Hakell / ML /OCaml

   – LISP/Scheme/Clojure

A couple of years should be enough (PER LANGUAGE).

Notice there is no quick fix here – if you want a quick fix go buy “learn PHP in ten minutes" and spend the next twenty years googling for "how do I compute the length of a string”