I've taught hundreds of people programming. For one year, at my first real job, I was tasked with teaching the programmers within a big company Pascal. All of t

I've taught hundreds of people programming. For one year, at my first real job, I was tasked with teaching the programmers within a big company Pascal. All of them were already professional programmers using Fortran, COBOL, or assembly language. The company had a commitment to modernize their software development practices and one facet of this was to introduce a more modern language--Pascal at that time (circa 1976). I enjoyed that year and, for the most part, my "students" were easy to teach, and Pascal held up well. They were all programmers already, so I didn't have to go slow through the basics and introducing ideas like recursion (absent in Fortran, COBOL, and assembly language of the period) kept the classes new and interesting to the students. Unfortunately, standard Pascal isn't really a good choice for a first programming language today, even though modern Pascals have removed many of early Pascal's limitations (packages, batteries included libraries, etc.) So, how can we decide if a language is a viable first language? Employing the wisdom of crowds, here are the top 30 languages in the 2023 IEEE Spectrum rankings: 1-10: Python, Java, C++, C, Javascript, C#, SQL, Go, TypeScript, HTML. 11-20: R, Shell, PHP, Ruby, SAS, Swift, Dart, Rust, Kotlin, Matlab. 21-30: Scala, Assembly, Perl, Visual Basic, Objective-C, Lua, Fortran, Verilog, Groovy, Julia. I contend that we should limit our choice of first-languages to some language in the top 30. This rules out many languages that I consider important, but we should stick with a language that is likely to benefit the student more than others as a first-language. That means not teaching Lisp or Racket or Ada or Ocaml or Prolog or even D for that matter as a first language. To narrow our top 30 down to a handful of alternatives, I'm going to use my own subjective difficulty rating and remove C++ and Rust and Scala from the list because they will be too hard for beginners. Furthermore, let's remove languages that aren't general purpose; this knocks out SQL, HTML, R, Shell, PHP, SAS, Matlab, Assembly, Visual Basic, and Verilog. Some languages require more complex build or execution environments; I would remove Java, Dart, Kotlin, and Groovy from our list for this reason. Finally, there are some languages that are not as easy to use outside of specific hardware or operating systems; I consider these languages C#, Swift and Objective-C to be ruled out. For good measure, I'm removing Perl from the list (a bit too irregular) and Fortran (not widely used outside of some important areas). Our condensed list now look like this: Possible first languages: Python, JavaScript, Go, TypeScript, Ruby, and Julia. To narrow it down even a bit further we can observe that one should learn JavaScript before learning Typescript. (Is this opinion shared by HN?) Ruby and Python seem like close cousins with Ruby being a bit prettier and Python being much much more popular. Julia is a bit specialized and a bit harder than the others so now we are left with just three: Python, JavaScript, and Go.