I’d weakly recommend Python, it’s free, easy enough, powerful enough to do simple but useful things (rename and reorganize files, extract data from text files, generate simple html pages …),is well-designed and has features you’ll encounter in other languages (classes, functional programming …), and has a nifty interactive command line in which to experiment quickly. Also, some pretty good websites run on it.
But a lot of those advantages apply to languages like Ruby.
If you want to go into more exotic languages, I’d suggest Scheme over Haskell, it seems more beginner-friendly to me.
It mostly depends on what occasions you’ll have of using it : if you have a website, Javascript might be better; If you like making game mods, go for lua. It also depends of who you know that can answer questions. If you have a good friend who’s a good teacher and a Java expert, go for Java.
I’d weakly recommend Python, it’s free, easy enough, powerful enough to do simple but useful things (rename and reorganize files, extract data from text files, generate simple html pages …),is well-designed and has features you’ll encounter in other languages (classes, functional programming …), and has a nifty interactive command line in which to experiment quickly. Also, some pretty good websites run on it.
But a lot of those advantages apply to languages like Ruby.
If you want to go into more exotic languages, I’d suggest Scheme over Haskell, it seems more beginner-friendly to me.
It mostly depends on what occasions you’ll have of using it : if you have a website, Javascript might be better; If you like making game mods, go for lua. It also depends of who you know that can answer questions. If you have a good friend who’s a good teacher and a Java expert, go for Java.