I think that for learning basic programming the best language might be Haskell. A lof of people doesn't have in mind that program is "mostly" simple tranformation of data that can be composed of many functions. I think haskell with it's purity and strong type system teaches it fast. REPL helps. But I also believe in educational power of simple C, although it doesn't have REPL or anything like that, but combined with some simple introduction how computer really works - maybe RAM model gives quite an insight. But learning is fastest when you can see cool things happen fastest and I don't think any of 2 mentioned above is good at this. But yeah - for very basics of programming I would rather pick Haskell over Ruby.