I am currently a grad student and working full time. Those that are telling you that you need to know specific languages or that learning java ruins you as a programmer do not know what they are talking about.
It is not about whether you know c or c++ or prolog (although all three are good to know), it is about understanding the concepts of coding. Even if you were to go learn 10 different languages, odds are wherever you work you'll end up coding in a language you don't know at some point. What you should be concerned about is understanding how programming _works_. You should know about object oriented programming, you should know about functions and serial programming. You should know about recursion and inheritance. The basics of which are nearly all contained within Java.
What you should be doing is going out and learning languages that are good examples of all the concepts you need to know. By learning those languages you will not only understand the concepts better but you will be able to learn NEW languages more easily, which is way more important than trying to learn all the languages you may encounter in your lifetime.
Most of the people that try to tell you that you need to know specific languages happen to code in those languages so those are the world to them. For my job I ended up using something called X++, I would never have gone out and learned on my own. But it was not a big deal because guess what, X++ turned out to be similar to Java and C#. If you know languages that cover most of the concepts, any new language you run across (with a few exceptions that are truly unique and interesting for that reason) will require you to simply learn their syntax because you will already know the concepts from the languages you have learned.
and in response to the knock to java: it's an excellent teaching language that uses OO concepts and it is easy to learn as well as being cross platform. It works great for teaching structures as well as algorithms. Those that claim it is ruining eduction probably spend too much time creating poor code in good languages since they don't feel that conceptual understanding of algorithms is necessary to an education.
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apparently I should have added html tags to that I promise that there were paragraphs there when I wrote it :)
I am currently a grad student and working full time. Those that are telling you that you need to know specific languages or that learning java ruins you as a programmer do not know what they are talking about. It is not about whether you know c or c++ or prolog (although all three are good to know), it is about understanding the concepts of coding. Even if you were to go learn 10 different languages, odds are wherever you work you'll end up coding in a language you don't know at some point. What you should be concerned about is understanding how programming _works_. You should know about object oriented programming, you should know about functions and serial programming. You should know about recursion and inheritance. The basics of which are nearly all contained within Java. What you should be doing is going out and learning languages that are good examples of all the concepts you need to know. By learning those languages you will not only understand the concepts better but you will be able to learn NEW languages more easily, which is way more important than trying to learn all the languages you may encounter in your lifetime. Most of the people that try to tell you that you need to know specific languages happen to code in those languages so those are the world to them. For my job I ended up using something called X++, I would never have gone out and learned on my own. But it was not a big deal because guess what, X++ turned out to be similar to Java and C#. If you know languages that cover most of the concepts, any new language you run across (with a few exceptions that are truly unique and interesting for that reason) will require you to simply learn their syntax because you will already know the concepts from the languages you have learned. and in response to the knock to java: it's an excellent teaching language that uses OO concepts and it is easy to learn as well as being cross platform. It works great for teaching structures as well as algorithms. Those that claim it is ruining eduction probably spend too much time creating poor code in good languages since they don't feel that conceptual understanding of algorithms is necessary to an education.