What programming language to teach first

For the love of god not VB.

When I started I learned c++. I would say this is a pretty good starting language since its very easy to transfer to c#, java, php, ect because of the similarities. But it also let the professors explain garbage collection, pointers ect. However c++ had so many annoying moments because the compiler messages were so cryptic which are really bad when starting out.

So that makes me believe that c# would be a better choice because of what visual studio can offer. It would allow the students to run through their programs 1 line at a time, see exactly whats going on as well as give much better error messages.

I think without qualification the question is silly. Are you teaching Grad School students? Middle school students? Who?

I taught my younger cousin very basic programming via StarLogo. He still needed help, but he learned.

I just started teaching my girlfriend a bit of ruby via irb. REPL is a great learning tool.

As far as teaching CS majors, I have no idea.

If I were teaching high school students I'd probably start with HTML and Javascript.

I think Javascript is a great intro language, you can start really simple (alert("hello!")) and dive deeper into some pretty complex programming without leaving Firefox/Firebug. Plus webapps are very accessible for High School students.

For CS students its really hard. Dynamic languages are nice because it simplifies much of the work you deal with in Java and C. But eventually you'll need to know what static typing is and how to allocate memory. I like starting simply and building on that base as opposed to diving in the deep end.

My college's first programming language was C++. Spent the first few weeks understanding bits and bytes and core programming concepts w/o even writing much code. It seemed overly complex for an intro, but maybe it was poor instruction.

His answers are pretty biased, Visual Basic (really?), C#, Visual Studio. Not that any of those things are bad (except I personally find VB pretty disgusting), but can they really compare to the simplicity, immediacy, and interactivity of Ruby and irb? Just as one example. Of course, as chasingsparks points out, the question on its own is pretty worthless without context. I think what language to use for CS 101 would be a pretty interesting debate.

Most important takeaway, obvious if you think about it: if the teacher is not comfortable (fluent, etc.) with the language, it's not going to go well.

From a learner perspective I can't think of any better first language than NXC-Not eXactly C, a C-like language for the Lego Mindstorms platform.

It is simple, powerfull and has a cool factor several orders of magnitude bigger than any web & desktop based thingie.

It is on Lego Mindstorms! What other programming language allows you to build a robot to chase the cat?

Chris Okasaki once conducted some observations of beginning CS students (I'm not sure if it's rigorous enough to be called research). His conclusion was that significant whitespace is a huge determiner of comprehensibility to beginning students.

That would suggest Python as pretty much the only contender for first language.

The first language I was taught at school was Pascal, and thinking back, it's probably a decent choice. The school board I was in used only macs, so VB is straight out, and C/C++ is far too complex to teach at a grade 10 level.

Basic is nice, but it lacks the explicit structure that Pascal, C/C++, and other high-level languages enforce.

I'm thinking Pascal is a good choice because it's explicit enough in its constructs to force the programmer to realize what they're doing, but not so fine-grained that you need to start thinking about memory management, pointers, and other more advanced constructs.

The skills are then easily transferable to other similar languages like C/C++, Java, C#, etc.

BASIC on an 8-bit computer?

I would go with something interactive that would make seamless switches between writing a program and running it.

Even REPLs like Python's and Ruby's seem overkill.

A dialect of Lisp would also seem appropriate.

Well yeah the opinions are biased. Teacher bias is a clear factor in success. That's the point. The second point is exactly that qualification is needed. What age group or goals do you have. hga seems to understand.

Not sure what he means about python not having an educational infrastructure yet? I hear about universities teaching python all the time, sounds like it has a solid infrastructure already.

Scheme

Perl followed by C