I'm new to programming: which language?

As the title says, I'm new to programming, I've only ever done basic and slightly advanced  Windows DOS language, and I know that is pretty limited in what it can/can't do. I hear that CL/Scheme are the main languages on this board, but I've also heard that they're old and obsolete, someone even told me that Lisp can't call external programs, is that true?

A couple people told me Python was a good language to learn, and I know a lot of programs are written in C/C++, and I've heard of some olders ones like COBOL, FORTRAN, Haskell, and a few others.

I've heard of these dynamic and static typing things, and I believe strong and weak typing, can anyone explain the difference? I've been involved in computers for most of my life, and I think it's time to advance my computer skills, and I could think of no better place than 4chan's /prog/, namely because I don't know of any other places, so....

Can /prog/ help me?

Static typing means that the code is checked for errors at a compile time, meaning that these are languages that translate from source code to an executable format.  A dynamically-typed language is much like JavaScript or HTML in that the code works just by being written and that any errors are checked when the code is run.  All C languages, Java, and Perl are examples of static languages that require compiling; an example of a dynamic language is Lisp, Python, and JavaScript (HTML also loosely demonstrates how dynamic typing works, even though it does not count).

A strongly-typed language has virtually immutable, common datatypes: int for whole numbers, double and float for decimals, char for single characters, String for groups of characters, and a variation of boolean data are common examples.  A weakly-typed language does not always specific what type of data a variable may contain.  In one line you can declare the variable with boolean data ("true"), in the next line you can reassign it a number (5.2), and several lines later that same variable can contain a string ("Hello World!").  C languages and Java have strongly-typed variables and Visual Basic is an example of weak-typing.

Note that weak- and strong-typing issues do not usually impact object-oriented polymorphism.