Having said bad things against JavaScript, I believe TypeScript might be a good start. Definitely a large community support and good tooling.
The problem with either of those is that you don't just need a decent language, you need decent teaching materials. And there's little of that that I'm aware of -- and Rust/Swift/Go aren't even intended for first time programmers (Although the Go Programming Language book might serve well enough, after all we got quite a few people who started with C, a language equally unsuitable for the beginner)
Pharo is a bit too "old", with 12 years (or 24, or 48, depending on how you count), but the environment has a neat little tutorial, and "Pharo by example" is a good book.
https://books.pharo.org/pharo-by-example/
Personally, I'd recommend older stuff/languages. Do the Coursera SML course and you're way more ready for the hot new trends like Elm or ReasonML than your fellow Java/C#/C++ grognards.
I actually think Web Development should be what every new hobby programmer should learn. It is the quickest, easiest way to get simple, understandable, showcase-able results.
I kind of miss the good old days of WYSIWYG Dreamweaver and Front-page.
You have to not only learn your language of choice, but also HTML, maybe even CSS and the fight with the query/respond nature of HTTP and/or asynchronous JS, callbacks etc..
Maybe if you're starting out with some Scheme setup where you've got an abstract page description DSL and a continuation-based framework.
No problems with keeping that as an intermediate, "now you're a real programmer" goal. But let's start out with "input name/fahrenheit -> print greeting/celsius" for a while and learn about structure, data types etc.
Simple graphics get you something that you can show your relatives and friends, too ("I made space flappy bird / the mandelbrot set"). And with way less mental overhead.
All are general purpose languages but each language has attracted developers concentrating on different fields. Julia is designed for high-performance scientific computing. Nim has generated interest from game and graphics developers. And Crystal has become popular for server-side Web development. But you'll find developers using these languages for a wide variety of tasks.
Crystal: https://crystal-lang.org/
Julia: https://julialang.org/
