Actually, TeX (what LaTeX is built on top of) is a turing complete language. While I wouldn't go writing anything complex in it, you could theoretically do anything in it which you can do in any other turing complete language (e.g. C/C++, Java, Lisp, etc...)

As for myself, I started with QBasic when I was around 12, and progressed into VB fairly quickly. While I dabbled in C++ breifly, it wasn't until uni that I started to get into that as my major language.

Other languages that I've done anything more than trivial coding in include C, Java, Lisp, Prolog, PHP, Python, Perl, C#, PowerBuilder and various forms of shell scripting.

I began with QBasic in primary but afterwards in highschool did some C++.
At Uni I had to go back to C and used VB linked with probabilities methods.

a very minute amount of C++. Then it was Visual BASIC.

If you mean regular VB, then absolutely true.

If you mean VB.NET then really just learn whatever the company you want to work at uses. In .NET 2.0 I think there are all of 4 things C# can do over VB.NET.

However, C# is a better structured language than any version of VB, so I'd go with that.

@topic

QBASIC, followed by Java (very basic). I then picked up some HTML and made a website before going to college and learning C, C++, Objective C, C#, PASCAL, and CLISP.

Basic, then C++; both as "additional breadth" courses at university. So... nothing that I actually intended to learn.

Depending on what type of soft development/programming you're interested in, generally C++ is widely used enough to be considered a good place to start, particularly for most game development platforms.

VB.NET has the same efficiency than C# if all the code you write is based on what the .NET framework offers, because there are some things that VB.NET keeps from VB6 (for transition purposes), and usually a person that comes from VB6 uses them instead of learning the .NET way, running that sentences need translating them to the .NET equivalent and then running them... So if you avoid using old VB6 sentences that are still available on VB.NET you should be fine

Example

Format(Object, style) is less efficient for .NET than String.Format(Style, Object) because the function Format (that comes from the VB text methods) is being translated to the String class equivalent, losing time in that...

C# being a "new language" does not have this flaws, but my pain in the ass is not with this language, is Microsoft beacuse they still don't include in their Visual Studio IDE C# precompiling like it does in VB, that should be already a standard.

Besides that, the choice is yours and the company you're working for...

Turbo Pascal. Sucks that I had only one year of Informatics at school, I would have learned more there.

Learning a programming language will not give you anything.
Learning to learn will put you way farther, and "learning to learn" is what should be taught in school, not specific things like a programming language. When you learn computer science, the language you learn is just a support for the abstract things you learn.
For example, computer science would teach you that HTML is NOT a programming language, because you just can't program with it. For example, it has no loops, and all programming language must have loops (Turing, ...) to be programming languages.
There are several types of programming language : procedural, functional, object, object oriented, ...
Just learning one specific language, you'll be completely lost when confronted to the other ones.

Basically, you're taking the problem by the wrong end.

C++, then Java, then C, then some X86 assembly, then C#(if you know Java, you know C#), and now I am messing with ActionScript 3(for Flex, the Halo 3 RSS reader in my sig is something I created in Flex).

And I agree with the post above me.  Learning the different paradigms is never a bad idea.  Once you learn one language, picking up another one is usual just a matter of learning syntax.

Well I'm not going to go into all of them, but the first few I will

Tandy Basic
GW Basic
QBasic
C
C++
C/Win32(Win32 is more a library, but there such a LARGE step)
...