I think JS is a great first language. In my experience as a teacher of programming, most students are not like me. Unlike me, nearly every student of my acqua

I think JS is a great first language. In my experience as a teacher of programming, most students are not like me. Unlike me, nearly every student of my acquaintance is motivated by making things. It's easier in JS to make things that are visually interesting, that are demoable to your peers and family, that are easy to deploy to a variety of useful environments. JS is a good starting language, for the typical starting student, because it helps them cultivate their intrinsic motivation. Less importantly, but still important to me: JS is also a more beautiful language than most mainstream languages, except for the ten or fifteen god-awful warts that it admittedly has, that everyone is disproportionately obsessed with. (I, unlike most of my students, was interested in computational thinking from the very beginning: iteration, recursion, data types, algorithms, etc, and I was uninterested in actually making things. My first languages were BASIC and Pascal and C, and as far as I can tell, that worked out okay.)