what is most useful programming language to know these days? what can it be used for?

Everyone always talking about coding is the way of the future... What I'm trying to figure out is what language is most useful to make some money doing freelance jobs, and what kind of "jobs" are in demand or do people want.

I feel like web design would be high up on the list, but what do I know... Anyone have some input on this?

It depends on what you want done. There's no one-fits-all-purposes language. For websites, you have PHP+HTML+CSS+Javascript (jQuery?). For standalone applications, you can either use .net or Java. For specific, and mostly directories/files related tasks, you have Perl.

There are many tools, it's a matter of knowing what you want to get done.

I think java

I personally think you should pick the language you like. Programming world is very big and nothing is impossible with every programming language. I would recommend you tho to look at php, html, css and javascript for web designing. C++ or java for standalone applications.

Most languages you can do anything with. I highly recommend javascript as its everywhere. You can do web programming, server side, desktop apps, scraping, even hardware with javascript/node.js. This I feel is one of the most versatile. Even more is something like C++ but the headache and time investment is much higher then JS. Depends what your goal is but at the end of the day learning great programming skills should make you able to work in most languages with not too much of a curb if you get the logic and using libraries.