Python remains the default starting point for most new programmers, largely because of its readable syntax and its dominance in data science and AI, where the majority of machine learning libraries are built with Python as the primary interface.
JavaScript stays essential for anyone building for the web, since it's the only language that runs natively in every browser, and its ecosystem now stretches from front-end interfaces to full back-end servers through the same language.
Beyond those two, the right next language depends on your goals: Go and Rust for performance-critical backend systems, Swift or Kotlin for mobile apps, and SQL for anyone who will ever need to work with a database — which, in practice, is almost everyone in software.