I spent ten years as a web developer, at first professionally, then as an adjunct to my jobs as a health researcher. I knew some Javascript and PHP, but I prog

I spent ten years as a web developer, at first professionally, then as an adjunct to my jobs as a health researcher. I knew some Javascript and PHP, but I programmed in a cargo-cult fashion and never really understood the fundamentals until I started learning Python about 3-4 years ago. Something about Python resonated deeply, and since then I've gone on to learn quite a bit of C, some Haskell, Lua, CoffeeScript, and yes, even finally understanding what using a prototypal language like JavaScript really entails. If you don't have a formal computer science background, I'd highly recommend Python as an excellent route to understanding programming, as opposed to just another programming language. If not Python, then Lua, Ruby, or some other language with good C interop, since with these languages you will almost inevitably end up learning some C, and C is a very nice complement to higher-level dynamic languages.