It all depends on what type of system you're going to develop for....
For Windows I would suggest starting to learn Visual Basic .NET only to start off with, don't take it very far. Just to the point that you understand about data types, strings, classes and things like that. Then try either Python or C# however I suggest you learn the entire language and practise with them a lot as they are very useful languages. Then finally learn C++.
For Linux I suggest that you start with either Perl, Python or Ruby (I personally like Python) and learn it proficiently. Then move onto something like C# or Java (I personally like C#), and finally learn straight C as most programs in the Linux environment are built in C and it's a fantastic language.
For Mac (better not be *grrr*) learn AppleScript and then Objective-C, apart from that don't even bother programming on a Mac, apart from web-dev in which case learn HTML (which is a markup language and not a programming language), also learn XML (again another markup language), and then learn PHP or JSP.