You are going to get a lot of different opinions on this one, but it really depends on what you want to do. If you are developing for the web, then PHP and JavaScript will help. Apple has a new programming language called Swift, which supposedly has the power of Objective C but the simplicity of LUA, so if you are going for mobile development, that is something to consider.

I don't know about XNA, yet.

But it pretty much depends on what you want to do. I get results almost instantaneously with the engine I use (Maratis3D, an open source game engine with Lua as a scripting language and C++ as the programming language, and major extensibility).

There is also Ruby, which is very easy. One use I know is for making plugins for Trimble Sketchup.

Hope this helps.

Edit: How could I forget Python? haha.

C#/XNA is a decent choice. Having a framework where you can quickly get something moving on the screen is a BIG motivator. You might consider MonoGame instead of XNA. If you go that route, here are some decent tutorials:

http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/monogame-tutorials

You should focus on learning the fundamental concepts of programming. Variables, loops, and branching. It's boring first few steps, but they're necessary. And from those few concepts explode out the possibility of so much more.

Start small. Don't try to make your dream game first. If you don't know how to program, start REALLY SMALL. Hello world ... Ask their name/say Hi <name>! ... Guess a number game ...etc.

Do a little digging in the beginner forums and you'll see about 2 of these types of posts per page.

- Eck

Just saw your post right before mine. C# is a bit more forgiving than C++, so it C# might be a better choice for you. Some problems like memory management are handled automagically for you so you don't have to worry about it (asterisk). C# plus a framework is even better (once you have the fundamentals down) since it wraps up certain things for you in easy to use classes allowing you to actually DO something instead of just tracing through memory allocations.

(asterisk) - You still have to worry about it, but most of the "simple" cases are handled for you. This means that when a memory issue DOES creep up it's often times sneaky and hard to find. I do recommend learning C++ at some point in your programming career, but for starting out/hobby game programming I can see how C++ would be overwhelming. Maybe take some courses on C++ to force yourself to stay committed.

- Eck

I stressed about with C++ (like just making a simple window!).

This as an example but also in general. A language is just a language. The important part is finding, researching and leveraging existing work out there so that you do not have to reinvent the wheel (needlessly) or code so much before you get results.

I.e with C or C++ I would simply call little more than the following to create a window.

#include <GL/glut.h>
...
glutCreateWindow();

So you are probably not looking so much for an easier language but rather an easier platform (including helper libraries) to automate using your language of choice (i.e to make a game).

The simplest platforms that I know are either Flash (AS3) for 2D and Unity (UnityScript/C#/Boo/.NET) for 3D.

With C++ (if you are interested), Unreal Engine 4 is suprisingly nice to use (has good tools). (It also provides a domain specific scripting type "language" called blueprint which I dont know too much about)

XNA is not much more higher level than SDL and OpenGL so I don't know if you will enjoy working with it as much as Flash or Unity.