"J. Eric Gilliland" <patzeric@yahoo.com> writes:
> So, here is a question.  Keep in mind that I am a
> non-programmer who does not work in the field at all.  If I
> was going to learn one language, simply to play around with
> and for my own edification, which language should I learn?

What are you interested in learning about?  If you want to learn about all of
the low-level practical nuts and bolts of how computers work, you might start
with C.  Someone mentioned assembler, which would also give you this, but is
not a particularly good place to start.

If you want to learn about the theory of computation, high-level things, and
be able to quickly write interesting programs, I'd suggest Python.  Or perhaps
Lisp.

Mike