What would be a good response when somebody asks what is the best language to learn?

I'm honestly seeing this in all of the newbie forums and they never agree on anything

How did you buy a new ice cream you've never tasted before?

@devTea good reply. People who usually ask this question have never made a little research.

What kind of application does the person want to develop? What platform? For a phone or tablet? A PC? A mainframe? Is it a financial app? A game? A medical app? All those questions need to be addressed in order to determine the best language to learn, because each language has strengths and weaknesses and no single language is the best. Learn the fundamentals, one can work with any language.

Also consider the reasons why you want to learn a language. Is it for getting a job? Contributing to a specific project? Automating some tedious or boring task? Do you want to learn a new language? Or a new programming paradigm?

And consider what you already know: Are you good at maths? Do you have experience with similar languages?

I'd rather tell them to think up an idea for software that they cannot currently achieve, but they want to achieve, and struggle for years until they learn the skills to achieve that goal. Why learn any language unless you are going to use it constantly?

Imho Javascript is very good to look into, you can make native (web) applications, mobile, desktop, server side stuff currently. Basically anything really

Depending on requirements, learning data structures and algorithms in C/C++ or something could also be the way to go, has the least barriers in my opinion (you can always jump to say js but the other way round is much much much harder).

Unless you really don't care much about it, starting off with JS or Python or something is going to limit you later on.

Trial by fire.
Always say C.