[cynwoody]

If you were to stake your career on mastering one technology, which one is the technology with the brighter future?

Lisp. Ruby. Python. Scala. Clojure.

Java, if you must. It's a wordy dog's breakfast of a language, but there are lots of tempting libraries available. In most cases, you can exploit these via JRuby and avoid soiling yourself with the actual Java language.

But never .Net!

[dfwgator]

Clarify, Java is a language, but it’s also the JVM, when I think of Java, I think of the JVM, Scala, for example runs on the JVM. So, more and more Java is becoming like .NET, where there are many languages that can now compile to Java run code to run on the JVM, just as many languages compile to .NET’s CLR.