While JS is hands down my favorite language (traits of FP, OOP, Procedural and Structured in one language), incredibly flexible with the most rich ecosystem one could ask for. It is not the best option to necessarily learn programming principles. I would suggest that Python is probably best as a first language, then HTML, CSS and finally JS.

I also think there’s a lot to learn from two more recent languages Go and Rust, but don’t think either of them are suitable for first languages either. Rust is probably better as a second language than most. The down side to Rust is that most documentation, examples and writing I’ve seen so far aren’t much use without at least some other language experience (C/C++, C# etc) first. Go is best for pushing bytes at scale.

IMHO JavaScript is the best choice for a first pass at pretty much most applications server and client-side. I even favor a lot of the portable runtime options (electron and cordova) and even React Native over competing platforms and native for non-web development. Node makes it a great option on the server. But there’s more to learning programming than jumping in with the most popular language. That would be akin to suggesting C is the best language to learn because every systems platform today uses its’ interface model for development.