Over my career I have taught a lot of people to program and in doing so I have found that the number one factor in someone learning to program is easy set up of

Over my career I have taught a lot of people to program and in doing so I have found that the number one factor in someone learning to program is easy set up of the languadge and the number 2 is quick feedback. In my experience Lingo in Macromedia Director was probably the fastest language that I saw people pick up, Visual Basic was another good one for quickly grasping concepts and finally modern JavaScript is a good choice. I do believe that first languages do matter as ones that impart a lot of rules and constructs seem to require more abstract concepts to click before a student can produce in said language. I personally would not teach a first language to an individual if it did not have some form of REPL type development pattern. In saying so, I generally try to teach people languages that are widely uses as most people that I have taught where learning as a job function and would be using their skills commercially. That being said, I tend to opt for JavaScript as a teaching languadge because it fulfills my main two requirements (easy set-up and quick feedback). It is also a skill in high demand.