Python is the most commonly supported atp. It's also worth learning at least one of the C variants ( C / C++ / C# ). If you want to be good at it, you'll also need to know a certain amount of math. At the minimum: Radians Sine / Cosine Cross Product / Dot Product Vectors Matrices
If you like programming, there will certainly be situations where you can use almost any level of programming knowledge. If you don't like programming, plenty of artists succeed without it. As for languages, I'd say Python is probably the most useful to an artist, as it'll let you write tools for Max/Maya/etc.
yeah I don't know a line of code and never really had need for it, but knowing how to do stuff with python or mel would be really nice, also some words that you find in shader system are probably well known to people that can do math but for someone like me that haven't even done beginner high school math it was a new…