The only language I know of that takes newbie-friendliness and accessibility seriously without compromising on technical vision is Racket. Seriously, read the

The only language I know of that takes newbie-friendliness and accessibility seriously without compromising on technical vision is Racket. Seriously, read the prologue of How to Design Programs: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/part_prologue.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/part_prologue.ht... It's clear and accessible, but introduces programming in terms of values and the idea of animation as a reduce/foldl of a function that returns image values over a list of frame numbers. Incredible stuff. And as a bonus DrRacket is simple enough for kids without compromising much on capability.