I figure this is sort of a "hedonistic traadmill" for software. The software most new users work with everyday is going to be GUI and event-driven. If you sta

I figure this is sort of a "hedonistic traadmill" for software. The software most new users work with everyday is going to be GUI and event-driven. If you start with an introductory language (BASIC, Python, whatever) and all you can do is prompt-and-answer, with no native UI conventions, you're not going to feel like you're a first-class citizen-- any wins you have in terms of code structure and algorithm design are always offset by a clunky experience that doesn't feel native. That's going to be a letdown to some new developers. There's also likely some conceptual language changes: many new developers start because they had an itch to scratch, and if the tooling they see doesn't let them describe what they want, they won't stick around. Today's new devs may well be thinking in terms of a UI. Another completely from right-field suggestion is TCL/Tk. There was a period (before the era of Python/Tk) when it was the easiest way to get a GUI project up and running on Linux. It occupies an interesting place between "shell automation" and "full scope programming"