But not all programming languages are equivalent, or there wouldn’t be so blasted many of them. It’s the “pretty much” bits in your statement that hide the critical details.
If you don’t believe me, try writing a web application in FORTRAN or COBOL. Or try writing a scientific or financial data processing script in C. Or try writing an operating system in Visual Basic. Or try writing a quick and dirty desktop application in PHP. All those languages have sweet spots, but if you try to use them outside their sweet spots, you wind up with more frustration than success.
And the question of “which language will get me started quickly so I can learn the basics?” is, I think, the wrong question to ask, because it completely ignores the type of problem you want to solve and the expressive power of the language, some of which may only be available to experts.
In the end, competent programmers will learn a dozen languages, all of them with different sweet spots. There is no perfect first language (although some are better than others). Pick a project, then pick a language that suits it, then dig in. You’ll eventually need another language, and you’ll learn it then. Trying to pick the perfect language before you start, without any inkling of what projects you’re working on, is the sort of analysis paralysis that will keep you from accomplishing anything until you get rid of it.