Best Programming Language to start with?

Hello peeps. As someone who hasn't been lucky enough to be immersed into the world of programming when he was young, and has a hard time getting into it with net ressources, I need an easy and fast-learning language to start off with.

Any recommendations? Cheers!

Visual C# or Java I think. Pascal and C are older imperative languages that make it difficult to implement some higher-level design patterns. The only real issue with C# and Java is that the technologies are more geared towards the web once you start expanding beyond the standard language and into applied development (i.e. .NET or J2EE).

Personally, I think C++ is a good middle ground.