There was a thread about this on Slashdot a few days ago.
Someone who sounded like he knew what he was talking about suggested
LISP I think - good for beginners to learn the basics.
Mercy, no. That would involve emacs, and all manner of tedious plumbing.
Apart from that, I have read a lot about the subject, and would agree
with the others who have suggested PYTHON. It is the best general
purpose language that there is.
Python's great strength is it's powerful, simplicity, and the fact that
it Just Works. You've got all manner of goodies in one neat package -
you can download and process web pages, send emails programmatically - a
whole cornucopia of stuff ready to go straight out of the box. How cool
is that? Moreover, it wont bog you down in complexity - you only need to
worry about the stuff that you actually use.
Basic is also another language worth considering. Microsoft's Visual
Basic is good, and lets you build GUIs easily - although of course it's
not free. If you have Excel, then that comes with VBA (Visual Basic for
Applications) - which is essentially Visual Basic.
I had a look at xbasic - which was recommended by a previous poster, and
thought it to be somewhat nastey-looking and not entirely intuitive. A
whole host of Basics are described at:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/basic.shtml
I am not able to recommend one in particular. It looks like you can
write nice spiffy GUIs in wxBasic, so maybe that's one to try out if
GUIs are your bag.
It's free and works on Windows, Linux,
and probably? Mac.
IIRC, Python was originally written for the Mac.
It's not the best for designing graphical games,
but is the best for doing real work, like processing of text or data.
You can also do GUIs with it using the inbuilt TCL - but I don't think
it is very well documented.
