It all depends what you are trying to do. Saying "I want to learn programming, which should I go with?" is rather like saying "I want to do art, which should I go with?". If your goal is to get signed by a record label, learning sculpture is not going to get you very far, even if you are a master at it.

As has been said, the actually language itself is less important than what you learn from it. There are simple concepts that are common to all programming languages, like variables, and ones like iteration, recursion and scope which similarly crop up again and again.

You say you did BASIC? So you probably recognise:
FOR n$ = 1 TO 10
PRINT n$;
NEXT

In PHP it is:
for ($n = 1; $n <= 10; $n++) echo $n . "\r\n";

In Java it is:
for (int n = 1; n <= 10; n++) System.out.println(n);

The point is that it's not the syntax (the words and the grammer) so much as the semantics (what you mean by it) that matters.

But beyond that, it also depends what you are trying to achieve at a higher level. If you are wanting to build a database driven webserver, then you'll find the PHP and SQL are useful, or ASP.NET, or any of the other web languages. Learning Fortran will not greatly help your goal of web work.

If on the other hand, you are wanting to write simple CLI scripts to speed up your work, then things like Bash and SED or Perl are useful (assuming Linux) or even VBScript on Windows.

For embedded systems, C and raw assembler will be far more useful.

So before you can get a good answer, you need to think a little more about exactly what you want to achieve. I know you mentioned scripting, but you need to decide what you want to script, and more importantly, WHY it is beneficial for it to be scripted.