The first programming language I was (formally) taught was Haskell and it was a joy, as long as the exercises are nicely written you can do a lot. After 4 or 5

The first programming language I was (formally) taught was Haskell and it was a joy, as long as the exercises are nicely written you can do a lot. After 4 or 5 weeks we wrote a calculus solver (able to do a lot of pretty interesting integrals and differentials, just from first principles). However the best choice for learning to program (in my opinion) is a language like Logo where you can immediately see your results and the concepts are incredibly simple.