[filburt1]

Visual Basic is a piece of garbage and will teach you every wrong habit you can learn. C++ is overly complex and archaic, and is ridiculously overcomplicated for GUI work.

I would suggest Java. No pointers, very easy GUIs, runs on any platform, almost human-readable code, and a lot of IDEs.

You can also try C#, which is generally Windows-only and models Java, only with more complexity.

I would not suggest learning PHP as your first language, because it easily lets you pick up bad habits. It has seemingly cryptic syntax errors that often don't really help to solve the problem, and you also need to set up other dependencies such as a web server to use it.