I started with Basic. Crap.
I had a look at Ada. Too complicated.
I tried out C. Too complicated, too.
I studied some C++ samples. What the *~#!?
I learned Pascal in school. And I loved it from the first time I used it.


Why?

Well, it's the ease-of-use of Pascal that makes it interesting for both beginners and advanced (hobby) programmers. You can't do anything wrong (well ... at least not that much as with C), because the compiler won't let you do anything wrong. And if you don't have any problems with thinking logically and developing algorithms, Pascal is the best PL to use.

Borland's TurboPascal 7.0 has a very nice IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and a complete help with examples. There aren't so much standard Pascal-statements that you couldn't remember, there are a lot of pre-defined procedures to solve problems, you can create include files (units) and you can integrate assembly-language directly into your programs (and, if you're masochistic, also straigh machine-code). Also is the syntax-design very clear, logic and easy to understand / learn (which is not case in, for example, C++).

This means that you can even program your own OS (if your crazy enough to ...).

Okay, it's got no Windows-capatibilities, but for Windows-programming, you can use VisualBasic. And the real programmer is loyal to his text-based OS ... or not ? ;-)