Interesting collection of comments. But...
Go for COBOL. Seriously. While lots of people slag on the language, that's a bit rude, as the language is generally older than any of its detractors.
Learning COBOL won't necessarily teach you that much about computer languages, but what it will teach you is how to handle a large class of real-world problems that C++ and VB won't. (And when you do get stuck trying to solve those problems with C++ and VB, you'll know why they're a bad idea)
COBOL is a very good language for its niche, which is business data processing. It's not a sexy niche, but it's a huge one, and more importantly it's a necessary one.
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