My experience learning programming languages (starting in grade school): 1980. BASIC (AppleSoft an TRS-80, but later DEC, Waterloo and QBASIC added to the mix)

My experience learning programming languages (starting in grade school): 1980. BASIC (AppleSoft an TRS-80, but later DEC, Waterloo and QBASIC added to the mix) 1982. 6502 Assembler 1982. Pascal (this became my primary high-level programming language in 1986–1992) 1984. C 1985. Rexx (still the best scripting language I've worked with) 1985. FORTRAN 1986. TeX (programming in a macro-expansion language is it's own bizarro world) 1987. PostScript (the joys of coding in a stack-based Forth derivative) 1988. Modula-2 1988. Metafont (Another Knuth macro-expansion language, but one with fewer quirks than TeX) 1994. C++ (it didn't really click until STL came on the scene, there were some awful C++ books published in the 90s) 1995. Perl 1997. Java 1999. PHP 1999. JavaScript 2007. Ruby (I had a diversion from 2002–2006 where I tried to leave programming behind for mathematics) 2009. Groovy 2009. Erlang 2009. Scala 2011. Objective C 2016. Swift 2018. Kotlin 2018. Clojure 2021. Rust I'm by no means an expert in all of these languages (I can really only claim current competency in the JVM languages these days, although my Rust is getting better and JavaScript is not so much a language anymore as it is a foundation for other languages built on top of it through the various libraries), but I do think that BASIC and Pascal still great languages for beginning programmers, although it's hard to go from, say, UCSD Pascal to dealing with OOP or FP which are the dominant paradigms of development these days. It's also somewhat interesting to see that my picking up new languages tended to come in clumps, with things piling on fairly quickly after my return to programming work in 2006.