nooc

My opinion is that a language based on BASIC is the best suited language to start with if you're a complete beginner. It is very simple to understand compare to other languages. As soon as you master BASIC, it's time to switch languages. I recommend anyone to to know as many languages as possible. When you've learned some languages that are in some way different from each other, you'll have no problem learning any new language. These days it's much harder to do any optimizing of the code by knowing assembly. The compilers are quite advanced today. You never know how they'll assemble your code.

I'd say asp.net is a lot more convenient if you have to get moderately advanced sites up in a short time (corporate), because of the powerful tools and a large function library. Both can do the job, however, don't forget that an asp installation requires a lot more from the server, as with all large frameworks. Personally I don't need anything else than PHP.