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An interesting question. I started out on BASIC at the age of 12 in 1972, then progressed through classics like FORTRAN IV and 66, obscure languages like JEAN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEAN), and on through Algol, Snobol, Algol 68, Pascal (horrible to learn after A68!), C, Occam, Lisp, Prolog, Scheme, ML, FP, POP-11, C++, Java, VB, C#, Perl, PHP, Javascript, and probably quite a few others that I have forgotten. Oh, and a few different assemblers too. Does SQL count as well, with its various extensions?
I have met many people over the years who claim to be able to program and when you dig a bit deeper they have never looked beyond VB or VBA. As has been commented here by others, the language itself is actually rather less important than an ability to think in terms of data structures and the algorithms that manipulate them. Just for laughs, try writing something just a bit beyond the "hello world" level in a variety of languages; say a simple implementation of a factorial function. It'll look completely different in most languages, but there is a core idea in there which should be pretty much the same in most cases - that core idea is what is important. Learn the benefits of different styles of programming (try writing in a straight imperative style in Prolog, or writing in a functional programming style in C, for example).
These are just tools that we use to implement our own and other peoples' ideas. People who get hung up on the perceived benefits of one language over another are just missing the bigger picture.
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