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wedrifid comments on What is the best programming language? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Learn assembly, C, and Scheme, in that order.
Start by learning assembly for some small, manageable microcontroller, like PIC16 (if they still sell those) or a low-end Atmel, preferably one that you could wire up yourself. Prove to yourself that you can make LEDs light up by writing bits to ports. This will give you a good understanding of what computers actually do behind the scenes.
Follow that up with C, for your desktop machine. Implement some common data structures like linked lists and binary trees (you could do it in assembly as well, but it'd be too annoying). Get a good feeling for pointers, memory allocation, and recursion. Learn what clean syntax feels like.
Finally, learn Scheme, which is a language of pure abstraction completely divorced from any hardware, operating system, or syntax (ok, this isn't 100% true, but it's close). Understand how you can manipulate very simple building looks to build powerful expressions, and how code can be used to generate other code and pass it around. Implement an object-oriented "meta-language" in Scheme.
At this point, you'll be well equipped to learn any other language you want in a manner of days. You will probably never use assembly, C, or Scheme ever again, but which would you rather have -- a single tool, or a factory inside your mind that lets you create tools at will ?
Oh, and stay as far away from C++ as you possibly can, it's pure poison.
I recommend outright reversal of the above process. If you absolutely must learn assembly language, do it once you can already program. The same applies to other excessively low level languages with a lot of emphasis on memory management rather than semantic expression.
I actually started with Basic, then went to Perl, then Python (which I didn't grok all that much at the time), and finally Forth, which is probably lower level than C in some respects but was somehow easier for me to stick with. I tried picking up C and couldn't get past Hello World. With Forth (specifically the RetroForth project -- which was a bit less smooth at the time) I built my own linked lists, dictionaries, string splitters, and stuff like that, using concatenation that maps more or less directly to machine code. Now when I look back at these other languages I see real stuff going on instead of magic. Maybe this is the equivalent of practicing fencing with a weighted sword.