What language would you consider beginner-friendly?
I would suggest something small, that you can realistically fit all in your head. I honestly believe Pascal is still an excellent choice. For something a little less low-level and more scripting-like, Lua seems nice. The JavaScript ecosystem is awkward, and there are things to criticize (no integers?) but by itself, it's a nice small language as well.
This is such a fantastic analogy. Thank you!
C++ tries to be all the paradigms, even if they're bolted on. Python is similar in that regard. Complex OO, functional, exceptions, decorators, lots of container types, iterators, generators, operator overloads... The only thing it's missing is a macro language.
Python's "batteries included" standard library stance takes it even beyond the C++ analogy in terms of sheer volume of out of the box capabilities you get.
I never experienced the "I hate Python" phase. I think I went straight from "So exciting" to "productive" phase with Python.
I reencountered Python at a data science course that was somehow mandatory for my masters in ODE numerics. It has a HUGE availability of standard and third-party packages, so you can be INSANELY productive. I'd write in Brainfuck if it was the only way to have like Pytorch and giotto-tda and networkx and fastapi in the same room.
If they would do that, then they would realize Python is as powerful as Common Lisp, Ada, C++,.... with similar doc size in pages.
And then you have macros like in macros that traverse and transform code.
Sorry, but Perl still wins there.
My first CS professor insisted the first year be done all on the whiteboard. And this wasn't back in the dark ages. It was long after every student had a personal computer on their desk. Everything was done in a low-level pseudocode somewhere between Algol and C.
She felt that computers and actual programming languages would get in the way of learning the principles. I'm not quite that hardcore. But she was on to something. I learned more from that class than any other.
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0636/
The above tutorial is based on user input but to my mind this mechanism seems equally good for teaching recursion on data structures as you would in say, ML.
When i tried to learn python i got caught up in trying to learn imports and classes and other things before i actually fully understood how stuff like variables, arrays and functions worked.
Its tiny standard library, which kind of makes it limiting, I think is a boon for learning. It forces you to remake the wheel at times. Despite not being an OOP language, I learned about OOP by trying to write my own class system in lua using metatables, hitting the limits of what I could do, and looking into languages with built in classes that had all the 'things I was missing' in my own hackish OOP attempts in lua.
As far as learning goes, not having the tools baked in forces you to learn about how they actually work when you have to remake them. It might not be efficient for people who just want to get the job done, but for learning it's definitely helpful.
Lua's also used in a bunch of 'fun' things. It's used as a scripting language in tons of games, half the time when I look up lua stuff these days it's all about roblox...which I think is big with the kids or something...it's used in fantasy consoles like the pico8 and the tic80, it can be used to script whole games with things like LOVE and the solarus engine.
Personally, I found it to be a good language overall for inspiring self-motivated learning. There's always something fun that can be accomplished with lua relatively easily.
I am very happy that I started with C. It has surprisingly few features compared to most languages and it gave me a good appreciation for how memory is managed at a relatively low level. The biggest downside was that it took me a long time to learn how to make anything I thought was "cool" at first (like GUIs, graphics, sounds, or networking). Some people might struggle with that.
I rarely write C code now. It's not as practical for the kinds of things I make and I have nitpicks with it just like any other language. But I don't think that's the point. Your first programming language is an instrument for learning first and foremost. Once you've become adapt at one language, it's relatively easy to pick up more.
Do you have an opinion about Common Lisp? I know that Scheme is more minimal and cleaner but since you recommend Scheme I want to know what your opinion about Common Lisp is.