Actually, there are more like 7000 programming languages out there, each with varying degrees of support.

Personally, I learned to program with VB 6, and the moved to C++ when I got to college. I found that VB was good because it was very easy to teach basic programming concepts (for, while, if then else, etc...) without having to worry about complex errors. After learning C++, I found the transition to C to be fairly easy, just some different headers and functions, and I can't use some of the "neat" OO functionality of C++, but it is fairly easy to learn coming from C. I would imagine that if you were going from C to C++ it would be slightly more difficult to grasp the OO and polymorphic concepts in C++.

Other good programming languages are: PHP, Perl, and Java (I personally despise Java, but that is just cause my experiences with it have been less than pleasant). Each language has its ups and downs, and you should always choose the language based on the application you'd like to make, not because of personal preference. Picking up new languages is easy, so the best thing to do is to choose languages that best suit the application you need it for (i.e. text parsing would be PERL)

Regards,
Wizeman