I'm also a real serious hardcore computer geek and privacy rights activist. And I strongly recommend that people use encryption, and otherwise protect their privacy, whenever and wherever they can. My computer language of choice is scheme. Scheme is a particularly elegant LISP variant, and it is astonishingly easy to learn and powerful. It's a language that has simple rules and gets most of its power from the fact that the rules have very few exceptions.
Computer programming is an awesome teaching tool.
Of course, like every hacker, there are at any moment a couple of projects I work on purely for fun. If you're a non-geek, your eyes must be glazing by now. And like most people who care about crafting beautiful code that works correctly, I have a sincere dislike of Microsoft. By their business practices, they've done more to hold back the development of good software than any other group of people in history. I am a proud member of the parrot club.