It depends on your long-term goal. For Windows or Linux platform programming, I prefer Delphi over C# or C++. Delphi has its roots in Pascal and it still uses that language's syntax, and I find it far more elegant. Though C++ will make the cross-over into something like Java or PHP easier because of the syntax similarites. For instance, in Delphi, blocks of code are delimited with BEGIN and END. In the other languages just mentioned, it's the curly braces { and } -- easier if you don't touch-type I suppose.
I agree with Python being the most elegant language to date for online development, but PHP is worth a hard look mainly because it's so widely available on shared web hosting providers, and it couples easily with MySQL. It's also an easy transition from ColdFusion, which has a similar technique of embedding the language directly inside HTML. This feature makes it easier to dive immediately into writing web applications, without having to learn a special CGI module as you'd have to do with Python or it's older relative, Perl. Ditto for MySQL support.
Additionally I should mention ActiveState's Komodo software, which isn't free but does have a trial version, and is my all-time favorite for developing PHP, Python, XML, XSLT, and a host of other languages, after having tried over a dozen others, including the one from the PHP giant, Zend Studio.