Programming's most basic concepts might be language agnostic (certainly, the electrical engineering part is; you can't have logic without and, or, & not; bit-shifts and math are omnipresent as well...), but you'll definitely get a hugely different perspective depending on which language you learn.
Assembly (or machine code, for the daring!) is the only way to really get 100% of your computer's speed, and talk to the hardware directly.
C++ is the de facto standard of industry, and just a step away from C, which means you get closer to the metal without sacrificing higher level control.
Java is rather bloated and verbose, but its large platform-independent libraries are quite useful.
Python is slow as a snail compared to all of the above, but it has such pretty syntax that programming time is cut down by orders of magnitude.
Lisp has a difficult learning curve, perhaps, but it provides the most ungodly amount of programming control, and has enough implementations that you can pick and choose your compiler vs interpreter, typed vs untyped, and other various aspects of your feature set.
And, of course, there are other scripting/programming languages, if you want to be more technical/practical -- HTML, PHP, and other web tech; Perl, of course; shell scripting; etc. etc. IMHO, I'd rather have learned that list of programming languages, in that order (not counting the extra scripting/prog'ing langs I mentioned, since you learn some amount of that just by spending too much time on the computer
). Of course, I've only learned Java and Python so far, and am working on C++/Lisp (Clojure, at least) as is.
So while language agnostic concepts are behind everything, I don't think anybody can get away with saying that programming in assembly and programming in Common Lisp are the same experience, especially as a first language!
EDIT: And of course, learning basic digital electronics (logic gates, flip flops, boolean algebra, etc.) is an absolute must, either directly before or after the first programming language. Experimenting with hardware, whether it be microcontrollers or building a PC from parts, is a plus.
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