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What is a good first language?

Name: Anonymous 2009-03-06 16:45

My 20 year old brother wants to get into programming.  I want to set him up with a language that has these features:

1. Easy to learn, must have simple syntax
2. Immediate results, easy to make graphical and text outputs.
3. Fully featured language(I want him to be able to easily progress into more advanced stuff and not be limited by the language)
4. Fast(So he gets the idea of how powerful computers are)

Name: Anonymous 2009-03-07 4:29

I think that starting with C/C++ is probably the best way to go. It's portably low-level, so you get a good understanding of how expensive something is. For example, because I know what pointers are, I understand that "reference types" in Java/C# are really just pointers, albeit with a bit more overhead, and that "primitives" are really just builtin machine primitives.

Another possibility is Haskell. It has little syntax, and its layout syntax is like Python's on steroids. Of course, it's hard to quickly do something in Haskell, so it might get frustrating.

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