My vote would also go for Java.
I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination and have only just “dabbled” in C, C++, Visual Basic, Prolog and one or two others.
Being an activist pragmatist regarding learning style I found Java to be very visual in producing an output, one can actually get something up and running very quickly.
I also found Prolog gives a different perspective from other languages because of its use of procedural semantics and for anyone interested in Natural Language Processing and specifically using Perl it is well worth looking into before getting to grips with the Perl Prolog modules.

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