[gumpzilla]

What would be a good first language these days? I learned on BASIC and Pascal, then learned C, Java, and specialized nerd stuff (Mathematica/MATLAB). None of these seem like an optimal choice; though Java didn't seem bad at all when I learned it, I already had a very solid basis in programming and only needed to focus a bit on picking up the OOP behavior, and if you're trying to do both I imagine it could get ugly. (EDIT: Oh yeah, and duh, I more or less knew C already. Trading C's memory management for Java's more than made up for learning the basics of OOP, so easiness all around.)

I'm interested in learning Python, and have started reading up on it, but need to find a good project to work on to learn it (really to get me interested enough to spend my leisure time learning to code rather than reading or drinking etc.)