I have been developing applications based on C# (.net) and Java (J2EE) for the last 3 years.
But now I feel, Java, C# makes you lame (from learning point of view) and yo
Whatever you start off with, my suggestion would be dump the full fledged IDE's. Use good text editors (vim/emacs)
The learning curve is better when using text editors since everything needs to be written on your own. No prompts and no pre-written code.
You have all the best answers above, in anycase. :)