I recommend clojure. I'm teaching a friend of mine to program with clojure for the following reasons: 1) clojure is functional - Someone with math background w

I recommend clojure. I'm teaching a friend of mine to program with clojure for the following reasons: 1) clojure is functional - Someone with math background will have no difficulty to think of computation as combinations of functions. And with map/filter/reduce there is a lot of fun stuff you can do. Also, there is no need to burden a learning programmer with pointers, and clojure doesn't bother you with that, it's all "by-value". 2) clojure has great data types - After all, it's all about data. Clojure shines with elegant notation and powerful processing of data structures, which IMHO is very easy and straightforward to grasp. 3) clojure has a REPL - Learning by doing helps a great deal to get a feeling for programming, because of the direct feedback. 4) http://try-clojure.org/ http://try-clojure.org/ - No need to install anything - get started instantly, do the further steps later. And there's a tutorial as well (never tried it).