Acquiring experience in any of the languages you reference has it's pros and cons. From a career perspective, however, adding languages to your portfolio will only get you so far. As someone responsible for project management, I find myself charged with the responsibility of meeting project needs with fewer and fewer personnel. That said, when I evaluate a candidate's resume I'm looking for someone with a solid programming background + _____.

Recently that blank has varied from OS proficiency (Sun/Linux Especially with a concentration on performance tuning) to DBA experience (Teradata has been increasingly popular... but even a slick understanding of basic SQL is a plus). Someone with design experience is always good... especially with the popularity of OLAP tools and such.

That being said, I would advise that you should garner some experience with one of the stalwart languages you put forth (java or c++) and then concentrate on expanding your knowledge of how the OS interacts with your programs. Learn shell-scripting if you can... or get really good at writing excel macros. Point your programs at different databases and learn what makes them different. Being able to port code is huge nowadays... with x software company going bankrupt or your mgmt deciding to drop Oracle for Db2 etc...

I hope this helps.

Jason

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