I'd tell them to learn Pascal, it's a language developed for teaching a language. It's structured, it is nice, simple and will give you a good footing to move onto various other languages.
The majority of users web programming problems are down to the fact the have no knowledge of programming, they don't know what indentation is, they don't know anything about local and global variables, they know very little about the basics, and this causes lots of problems (from what i see).
When it comes down to it, each language has a purpose, each task is more suited to a specific language
ryan