I bet that
most people here who just said 'C++' or some other obscure language don't even know what they are talking about.
If you are an amateur, learn BASIC.
They say that if you learn a dialect of Basic as your first language, then you are braindead.
Anyways, I would suggest that you learn C as your first language. I personally think that C is the purest form of programming, due to the fact that you can program with extremely high level concepts, or you can control, allocate, and remove bits and bytes directly in memory and in registers. C (and C++) are also very portable compared to other languages, which is a big plus in my book. After one learns C, I believe that they should learn C++, and create larger projects and things of the sort, due to it's Object Oriented nature is more suited for large source code.
For some reason, I have never liked C++ all that much, I personally think that it is way too bloated. OO code can compile into a mess, but as I said before, it is still an awesome language for large projects that need organization to survive.
After that being said, you could also learn other languages:
One of those being Python. Python is a great prototyping, and project oriented languages that allows you to quickly learn and write code right off the best. Many people tout this language as being a good beginner language, but I really would say that if you have the patience to stick with C, go with it (it's much faster). I found myself writing functional code for it, right as I learned the language, and created a functional GUI within a couple of minutes! The only problem with this language is that since it is interpreted, it is pretty slow.
Another language that I have come to love recently is Perl. Perl is very loose form, and actually allows you to make lots of mistakes if you don't include some warning directives, and I would not recommend it for your first.
Java was my first language, though I have forgotten most of it, after delving into C. Now that I look back on the language, I really dislike it. The Garbage Collect (a process which frees up memory in your program so you don't have to do it manually, like in C) is horrid. Though you may not see it's flaws when you first start to program in it, I believe that after you get into the language, you will bee enlightened. The only thing that I can really say is good about Java is that it is even
more cross platform than a C language because of it's virtual machine.
Javascript, Torquescript, LUA HTML, etc are not programming languages, they are either markup or scripting languages. There is a difference.
Programming can be hard at first, but you will soon realize that once you have grasped the concepts for one language, you will be able to grasp any other language that you would like to learn. Then all you have to do is learn the syntax...it's easy! Whatever the case, just be diligent and good luck!
