If I taught young people with no experience in programming, I would begin with PHP (after learning basics in HTML). It is a horrible language, but you can quic

If I taught young people with no experience in programming, I would begin with PHP (after learning basics in HTML). It is a horrible language, but you can quickly do stuff that you can see everywhere on every browser, you can quickly show them to the world, you can host them everywhere, there is no compilation/porting/deployment/etc. that you have to go through to actually run your stuff and be excited. That is, I think, more important than teaching a language with perfect object model or perfect lambda calculus.