This summer I'm going to university to study physics. I thought I'd prepare myself a bit for this and so I thought it would be quite useful to learn some programming. I asked around to hear what people thought would be a good programming language to use in my education and I got answers from Perl, PHP, C++ to Pascal. Being completely new to the whole programming thing I naturally got quite confused. After some research I thought I would start on VB 6.0 as that seemed pretty straight forward. Later on, I thought, I could then move on to a language more suited to my needs. I have completed a 21 day course in VB 6.0 programming and that's about all the experience I have with programming.
My question is this: Should I stick with VB 6.0 programming to get more familiar with programming, and then later switch to an other language, or should I start looking for other languages straight away?
What would be the best language? C++, C++ .NET Pascal or anything else? Keep in mind I'm quite inexperienced, though I'm also keen to learn.