A category that's been extremely close the last few years.

--jeremy

I'm gradually moving from Common Lisp to Scheme (Racket), so this year my vote goes there, probably. (Sorry, C!)

I'm abstaining this year.

I work with PHP, but after over six years working with PHP full time, following a few decades of c/c++, I've really come to despise PHP. So I'm back to voting for c++, my first and only love.

C because Linux kernel can't exist without it.
Also the whole world runs on C deep inside

I'm abstaining because I'll use any number of these depending on the purpose.

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By next year it might be time to add Perl 6 / Raku. Despite the initial name confusion, it is a different language from Perl 5.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6

Ruby.
I prefer it from Python because I do not know enough Python.., and, because I can do whatever I want in Ruby, break my neck, pierce my kneecap, lay my home in ashes... And the language won't interfere.
Cool.., erm, sorry. I meant: awesome.

C++ & Python all-the-way! Python for the scripting side of "things"
Going to try learning C# this year as I want to see how it compares. Haven't touched straight C since around 2002.

Do you have a C# project in mind?

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Not yet... just going to play around with it for a bit at first.

Might rewrite one of my older programs in C# just for fun (a notation/db-entry system that I created with another guy to use at an older job). Mainly want to see what the differences are & explore it. All I've really done so far is some informational research & watched some boring comparison tutorials via Youtube lol. A friend told me I should really check it out though. Once my work schedule eases up a bit, I'm going to try to dive in. Guess you could call that my "New Year's resolution" And who knows... I might even like it better than C++ eventually.

No *sh? (some classic sh, ksh, bash.) I'm not voting for it but it'd be higher on my list than many most languages there.
Wolfram (a.k.a. Mathematica) is another excellent one, since it's the largest mathematics programming language (top academic one, manual would fill a bookshelf.)

So hard!
I use ruby the most, so I went with it, but C is pretty amazing.
I am also looking into assembly and Lua.
Anything except Java(-6).

While I can't speak for anyone else, it is too little too late for me. But, who knows, I may give it another try some day.

How is bash not on this list?

I'm a systems programmer, my main language is C. (As awful as it is -- it really is assembler with a compiler.) However, I build of lot of my development support tools in bash. It handles strings and regular expressions intrinsically (and let's face it, programs are made out of strings); it (together with the rest of the command line) is among the most "object oriented" languages around -- if you want a file, you get everything about it, same if you want a device or process or socket, etc. (Ok, that would then include things like Perl....) (And, yes, bash has it's own awfulness too. It's way to syntax-happy, for example, but (1) that's all based in history and (2) that applies equally to Perl and Haskell among others.)

My next favorite language for building tools is emacs lisp. It has all the string and regular expression support on steroids, and it has a great execution environment. I've been called "old school" for this (even 20 years ago!), but emacs does everything any modern IDE does and I don't have to learn it anew for each new language or programming environment. And, of course, due to its free nature, I can go straight to the source code (deeper than the documentation) to understand what's really going on, and change or customize it. Besides, it's not syntax-happy.

All that said, among the choices I'm picking Haskell. It's strong typing occasionally makes it hell to get the first version of something right, but, then, if it seems like it works, it really does.