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Mine (starting in late 1980s) was GW-BASIC -> Visual Basic (esp with Access) -> Ruby -> PHP/WordPress -> JavaScript -> everything else. It worked then because i

Mine (starting in late 1980s) was GW-BASIC -> Visual Basic (esp with Access) -> Ruby -> PHP/WordPress -> JavaScript -> everything else. It worked then because it was hard to find education material, and the alternatives (C, Lisp) were so damned hard. I think the trade-off is that Python has an immense ecosystem - libraries (e.g. PyGame Zero), education material, people. Plus you can point to real-world examples of people building stuff with Python - you can make actual money with it. I'd be worried that teaching BASIC puts them in a niche - one where they make progress more quickly, but struggle to get out of.

zozbot234 3y ago
> I'd be worried that teaching BASIC puts them in a niche - one where they make progress more quickly, but struggle to get out of. I'd think that learning BASIC then Python (or Ruby, PHP, JS, whatever) would still be a lot easier (at least for a 10 year old kid) than starting with one of the latter languages directly, due to the incidental complexity that all of those have. Most pro developers will be able to work with more than one language anyway.