I'll go ahead and link
this. It's a quick look at a variety of commonly used languages, such as C/C++, Python, Ruby, Lua, etc. Take a look at some of the examples, and see which one looks the best to you.
Since these rundowns are targeted at people who have had previous programming experiences, these are no proper tutorials, but a taste of what you may be learning. After you've selected a language, I'd look up a more in-depth introduction.
There's no one definitive language you should learn first before anything else. It all depends on what you want to become familiar with. Nowadays, you can pretty much make any sort of application in any language, e.g. making
web servers with
moonscript.