Python is a nice language because of the everything and the kitchen sink approach to the built-in libraries. It also has a clean look because of the significant whitespace. Ruby is another nice language. It seems to be a bit more esoteric as far as some of the more advanced language features but for the beginner the language lets you accomplish it in more than one way. C is a fine language too but you will spend your time working on memory protection instead of getting things accomplished fast. It is more useful on memory constrained systems.

Every language is useful in a different way and each have a domain or two in which they excel at.

The real takeaway is that the shift from knowing one language to another is fairly easy. The real trick is knowing the idioms of the particular language and how to use them.

http://www.pythonchallenge.com or http://rubyquiz.com/

Yes, C can work fine.

I learned C64 Basic, QuickBasic, C, Pascal, some Prolog and Lisp, Forth, Redcode (assembly), more Scheme, C++, and Python, Java. (And later Clean and Haskell.) I would not call this an optimal sequence. And it heavily overlapped. E.g. I only really got Scheme after playing around with Python a bit. And for some strange reason, I saw the light of higher order functional programming only when I began with Clean. In Scheme it felt too clumsy.

But what's `optimal' depends on what your goals are. If you happen to be in that part of the population that just can not not program, then you will eventually learn how to do it. Even if somebody locked you up in a dimly lit closed with just a reference manual. Just the amount of fun you will have, and projects you accomplish will vary. I learn programming languages for fun.

Python has a very nice library called PyGame that let's you produce some interactive graphics and sound (i.e. a game) quite fast. It's nicely documented. And in PLT Scheme images are first class objects, you can even embed them in your source code. I looked into Squeak, a smalltalk implementation, once, but it did not click for me.

If I had to start again on the same hardware, I'd spend less time with C64 Basic and tried to get Forth for the C64 or do some assembly there. On modern hardware I'd take Python as the first conventional language, and Haskell or Clean as the first real language. (I am not sure whether I should start with a conventional language.)