I'm not saying this because I like Go per se, though one might argue I like Go because I can say this, but "Go, but stay away from all concurrency for a while"

I'm not saying this because I like Go per se, though one might argue I like Go because I can say this, but "Go, but stay away from all concurrency for a while" is becoming my go-to recommendation for new programmers. Fewer foot guns, it's close enough to the metal you can learn about it (there's even an assembler you can play with if you want to), and despite being 15 years old is essentially not the result of 15 years of language-construct-astronautics. It also lacks a lot of the accidental complexity of C in the compilers, using new modules is "go get" rather than essentially learning a new sublanguage, a lot of advantages. But do stay away from the concurrency. I occasionally get flack on that point, but try to remember back to your programming days when you were having enough trouble keeping track of how one instruction pointer was flowing; it doesn't help to immediately try to keep track of multiple. Gotta recover the novice mindset for a moment when recommending programming langauges. I used to recommend Python, as many others did. Your cited disadvantages of such languages are certainly true, but Python used to make up for it with the ability to do real work relatively quickly, and while it may not have taught you how the machine worked, it did a good job of teaching programming. But now... well... Python was my primary hobby language for about 8 years around 2000-2008. I'm fluent in Python. I wrote metaclasses. I wrote a bit of a C module. And I can still read it, because I do check in from time to time. But it's not the same language anymore, and almost every change it has made has made it harder to recommend as a new language. It used to be the simple alternative to Perl that still had most of the power... now I think it's harder to read than a lot of Perl 5, what with all the constructs and the rules about what happens and the difficulty of resolving what a given line is going to do with all the ways of overloading and decorating and overriding everything. And the culture of having all this power, but using it selectively, is gone from what I can see; now it's "we have all this power and what a shame it would be not to use it".