After learning a large number of programming languages, if I was going to start someone fresh with learning to program, I would pick either a scheme ( in partic

After learning a large number of programming languages, if I was going to start someone fresh with learning to program, I would pick either a scheme ( in particular racket ) or a smalltalk. Scheme is a little bit on the 'toolkit-y' side and slightly less accessible than smalltalk for someone just starting out but, both have what I consider most important: a minimum of rules and syntax. anyone learning to programming in either would be primarily focused on how to solve the problem in front of them rather than solving the language. This all said, I haven't tried this out in any scientific fashion so it is mostly just intuition.