I still think QBasic is one of the better ways to get people interested in programming. It starts off very simple, but you can really go a long ways with it.

I still think QBasic is one of the better ways to get people interested in programming. It starts off very simple, but you can really go a long ways with it. Plus it's got some pretty powerful, yet easy to access graphics and music capabilities built right into it. My first programming class in high school, we went from Hello World to creating an animated Christmas card, with MIDI Christmas carols accompanying it, in the first semester. QBasic might not have been the greatest language, but it had a pretty sweet IDE, fantastic live documentation, and was really just fun to play with. I feel like there ought to be a packaged up Python distribution with the same kind of attributes, but I've never really seen anything that really aced that spot the same way.