It seems that questions of this type always degenerate into a pro/contra 
between programming languages for various application domains.

There is always going to be a difference of opinion as to which language 
is suited for a particular task with majorities agreeing on specific 
languages.

What I miss in these discussions, especially when someone new to 
programming is asking is something that is obvious for me:
If you want to be a programmer (or a software engineer) you *have* to 
now more than one language.
If you want an analogy, take painting:
Sure you can paint using color markers, but in order to be a painter you 
should know how to paint with coal, oil paints, temperas, pencils etc.

Knowing a set of languages gives you the choice of the right tool for 
the right job but more importantly it gives you the knowledge and 
different perspectives to know which tool is the right one.
It is my belief that to get a good grasp of software design and the 
principles behind good, solid software you need to learn more than one 
language.

So I would say start learning C++ *and* Ruby, throw in C# to get to know 
the world of strong statically typed objects and don't stop.
There's C (someone finally separate C from C++ in the minds of 
programmers. I've seen too many C programs claiming to be C++ just 
because they used cout) and Pascal, Visual Basic (bliach! although VB9 
promises to resemble a proper language), Perl, Python (although for some 
people it's a mutialy exclusive relationship between Python and Ruby), 
Lua and lots more.

Cheers,
V.-
-- 
http://www.braveworld.net/riva