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?

>>41
The only time Sepples os faster than Cee is when you have computations that can be performed at compile time and the compiler can specialize on them with templates. (That includes stuff like vtable lookup or whatever.)

The major caveats to this mostly involve the braindead binary file structure that typical C++ compilers use. For example, you have to include all specializations on a template in the original file where the template was defined. This makes it useless for writing libraries, and can wreck the organization of a normal project.