I'll second the call to Python. There's a fairly large community around it, it has a lot of libraries to use in your code, the source is very easy to read both because of it's enforced formating rules and the clarity of the language itself, and on top of all that it's even useful.
My point against Ruby is that it has a lot of magic. Python explicitly tries to remove magic and make everything clear. Magic is nice once you grok it, but for learning I'd want things to be straight forward.
(edit: late, but I should add why in case you visit again. I find Python to be quite a good cross between the C/C++ based dialects and, say, the newer, and ref a pg article, languages "closer to lisp." Also the syntax reads pretty close to English, and is beautifully formatted. The documentation is plenty too. I'm pretty much all PHP, but I'd recommend Python :) )