Which language to learn?

I know that this has to be a quite frequently asked question, but a group only gets more valuable members by helping people who want to learn. Currently I'm sort of proficient with DOS commands. Obviously you cannot create a complicated graphical program out of DOS. I've heard all over this board that Python sucks, which ironically is the one language most of my friends recommended learning. What language can I learn that is actually useful?

I come to /prog/ for you guys are the only assholes on the internet that will bash other languages if they do suck. Forums have to be 'unbiased' and 'neutral'.

>>1
Your friends are smarter than /prog/ gives them credit for. Python is pretty good; semantically it's very similar to Scheme and Javascript, with the addition of formal OOP-isms because object-oriented programming makes you popular and cool. As a result, it's possible to work through most of SICP in Python.

The one thing you're missing out on with all of these languages is a type system, and the automatic bug-checking it brings to your code. If you ever get sick of bugs in your code where your function expected a complex number and you passed in a list of batting averages, try switching to a language with strong typing (meaning you can't break the type system) and type inference (meaning you don't have to explicitly say what the type is every time you declare a variable). This will allow you to retain the brevity of dynamically typed languages while also writing safer code. A good example is Haskell, which also has the benefit of being very fast.

We might laugh at you for your choice but we're basically just schoolyard bullies. By the time you're skilled enough to write big programs, our usual jokes about Python and Haskell will probably no longer apply, so you'll probably never understand what all the fuss was about.