Javascript is a good choice for a first language in that a learner can do exciting things with it and development tools are widely accessible. I disagree with t

Javascript is a good choice for a first language in that a learner can do exciting things with it and development tools are widely accessible. I disagree with the idea of teaching languages being separate from business languages. That said I think there is value in the idea of a minimal language, so I'll try being the devil's advocate. As far as I can tell Wirth does not think that students should be picking up Pascal these days. He was referring to his thinking back in the 60s when he was discussing the same ideas. I agree that a first language should show you the concepts that are the best we know, and likely to encounter. Oberon has numbers, identifiers, expressions, statements, etc. It has subroutines, references to locations in memory, structured control flow, and both simple and complex data types. Its type system is what provides the support for object-oriented programming. This seems like a reasonable set of things that a starting student will encounter. Can maps be done in this language? Yes. You could in a course introduce the concept of maps by having the students implement them on their own. This reduces the amount of what feels like magic involved in the language, which is something Wirth seems concerned with the most. Are other elements of functional paradigms likely to be encountered? Really depends. Some languages do not have support for closures even while calling themself functional. They may not guarantee that tail-recursion does not expand the stack. At the same time, Lisp had none of these things in its first implementation, and was still functional-enough to be a educational and research tool. I am not sure it is something that you are likely to encounter in any one form, but the concepts should be taught. You could teach what a closure is by implementing a restricted one inside Oberon, and can do recursive functions as long as the stack allows. Async has a lot of variation, even if you are likely to encounter it. IMO parallelism is better taught as a concept and then applied using games. It is difficult to build an intuition of it at a programming language level.