1) Rank what you've seen in list order, most-interesting first. It doesn't matter if you just like the logo, or mascot, or other irrational things. That's still free emotional energy you can tap into.
2) Rank based on how they fit your technical and logical needs. Platforms you want to develop for, libraries you may need, tooling or editors or OSes you want to use. Support for your native written language.
3) Look at the project's subjective past. Why did it start, why did the dev team last change, what's the overall story they are writing. Does it match well with your story?
5) Look at your probable future. Are there any future needs you'll need to meet with this education? Does the language help you toward those ends? Again you'll probably want to rank them.
5) Look at the probable future of the project. When was the last release? Are modern libraries or tools supporting it? Is the website up to date? Is the forum covered with posts asking when there will next be a release, or is the core team still energetic or stable?
Upon answering these personalization questions, that's when I'd look at more objective factors, like what other people say about it based on their personal circumstances.
Good luck to you, there are tons of amazing choices out there, and some beginning programmers can even start with more than one language...
On the other hand, there are a lot of CS concepts that go beyond algorithms, and I think understanding how e.g. C++ is written, precompiled, assembled, etc. is really valuable information.
It is sort of like the argument for or against starting with an IDE - training wheels on vs. training wheels off.
I supposed ultimately it comes down to your goals, but I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts!
An ideal to me might be Javascript in a sandbox like Khan Academy's Javascript courses[1]. It feels like when I learned programming in AppleBasic or Borland's QuickBasic. My son does these occasionally - there's many games people have created you can explore and hack on. Reminds me of trying to figure out how Snake worked in MS DOS back in the day.
1 - https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming
Hear me out. It runs in the browser so there is no setup.
You can see all of the blocks so there is less cognitive overhead trying to remember syntax.
There is a huge community, they had 30 million active users last year.
There are tons of books, courses, videos, and a forum to ask questions.
Regardless of what language is first learned, I wish that more attention was paid to how the language is introduced and used. Specifically, rather than going bottom up mutating things willy-nilly to get the job done, express solutions decomposed in a functional style with localized side-effects. Keep using this pattern until it's the first/second nature.
So much of becoming a good developer is unlearning bad habits picked up starting day 1.
I really learned how to program when I had problems to solve, at the time I wanted to automate unrelated programs on Windows that needed the same data entered into them; I used autohotkey, but probably wouldn't recommend this unless you want to automate other software.
I moved onto python after that. Python seems to have everything needed to easily learn what you need to know, with libraries for everything. This is beneficial when you start out, at least for me.
However if your aims are more modest you may find another language that better matches your needs.
Javascript: run anywhere
Python: utilities
Java/C#/C++: prepare for enterprise jobs