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I primarily work in C++. My question is, for a C++ developer, what languages are beneficial to learn, from a job-profile point of view. For example, I see a lot of work combining C++ and Php these days. Conversely, I don't see a lot of work combining Ruby and C++ (unfortunately).
Of course, learning another language is beneficial regardless of whether it compliments a language.
I'd vote for Python or Ruby. C++ is The Language for doing as much as possible statically at compile time. Learning Python or Ruby will teach you how to think in terms of doing things dynamically at runtime. I'm in a similar situation, using D and Python as my primary languages. D's template metaprogramming is much more powerful than C++'s, but it's still all at compile time. Python's metaprogramming and reflection is all at runtime. It's a very useful combination because often there are idioms that are useful in both languages, but are more obvious in one than the other. Therefore, my D experience makes me a better Python programmer and vice-versa.
On another note, Python and C++ complement each other in that C++ is good at performance and bad at programmer productivity, where Python is just the opposite. If you learn both, you'll have mastered both ends of the spectrum on this tradeoff.
I think PHP compliments C++ nicely. In both cases, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel of languages, but PHP has so many annoyances that it makes C++ look like a diamond in comparison.
As far as languages that complement C++, I'm not sure.
I recommend Erlang. C++ is mostly used for performance, but it doesn't have great support for large scale concurrency. With that in mind Elrang would be a great complement since it has great concurrency performance but not very good performance for number crunching. Erlang is often used together with C/C++ in distributed and embedded systems, specially in telecom. Erlang is good support for interfacing with C&C++.
Python is often used in combination with C++ for file manipulation (and c++ code generation) and embedded scripting.
It does depend a little upon the platforms you are supporting, but if Windows is a platform, learning C# and the related techologies should keep you employeed for some time.
C++: a kitchen-sink language, statically and manifestly typed.
Sounds like a good complement would be a language with a very few concepts, dynamically and latently typed. Sounds like Smalltalk!
F# It's a functional language, statically/strongly typed but with type inference. You can use OO-style if you wish. Has a REPL for quick prototyping/scripting, type providers to access all kinds of data, pattern matching, easy async, parallel, and agent based computations.
It depends, what problems do you need to solve to accomplish your main objective: delivering software?
For me, knowing Labview lets me maintain and extend our real-time data collection tools. These produce a lot of raw data, so having a scripting language to parse and reduce it is extremely useful. I use Ruby.
Batch and/or shell scripting can also come in quite handy.
Node.js supports C++ addons. With the attention REST and microservices have been getting lately Node.js and JavaScript would be great addition to the language arsenal of a C++ programmer (if you don't like dynamic languages, there's a superset of JavaScript offering type checking called TypeScript.
Although C++ is not used very often in combination with Node.js, it can be easily integrated.
