This is one of the great questions of the age and I believe you will find as many answers as people responding to your question. There will be several good answers and I don’t know if one can be the correct answer.
First let me ask you how you plan to use your programming skills. If you plan to make this a career or become an expert in the field I would suggest a lower level language such as c or even assembly as your first language. This is certainly far from easy but it will provide you the necessary understanding for higher level languages.
If you are only going for a casual experience I would recommend some of the higher level interpreted languages such as Java or Visual Basic.NET. I am personally a Visual Basic.NET programmer and I am able to spit out a fairly complicated program within a few hours. This is good for the beginner because you get instant feedback and you also get a sense of accomplishment.
My final question is what do you want to do? I firmly believe that in order to enjoy programming, you must have a purpose. I went through college learning c, java, and even Motorola 64000 assembly. I never really programmed because I never had a reason to. After college I needed an application to download images from a certain webpage and save them to a specified directory on the local machine. This was the first true time that I used my programming knowledge and enjoyed it. From this my eyes were opened and I have enjoyed programming ever since.
You may best be served by telling us what you want to do and then we will give you suggestions on what language to use. I believe the best language to learn first is the one you have a need to use. Programming is hard and the first steps will be difficult but if you have the drive and desire to learn, it is possible no matter what language you use.
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