Best Language for Beginner Programmers?

jahardman asks: "I work at a High School that has recently seen a decline in the number of students that want to take our entry level-programming course in Visual Basic. We have been toying with the idea of having the introduction course be in PHP or Ruby on Rails; but are not convinced that they lead well into higher level languages. Does anyone out there have suggestions as to what would be a better language to start students with? Ideally one that might be more 'enticing' as well?"

Perl.

[Pacifix]

Perl. We don't need any more competition! Perl should just about scare the living daylights out of them.

Noooooo!

[Xtifr]

Please, it takes kids YEARS to recover from the damage that learning any flavor of BASIC does!

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
                -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5

Things (specifically BASIC variants) have improved since Dijkstra wrote that, but an underlying fundamental truth remains.

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first teach BASIC."
                -- unknown

Re:Teach programming, not the language.

[BrokenHalo]

In other words, consider assembly code. Sure, it takes a bit of effort to learn, but it's still by far the best way to really get to grips with programming.

Re:consider Python

[croddy]

hey, you spelled "spaces" wrong.

Re:Anything that starts with "C"

[theonetruekeebler]

Java is like C++ with training wheels.

Java is C++ without the giant rotating knives.

Java's "music" class library appears to support every musical instrument in the symphony but on closer inspection requires you to understand metallurgy before you can instantiate a trombone, and spit valves are in the open position by default. C++'s music library on the other hand assumes that all brass insturments are, at their most fundamental level, a kazoo. You can drive it with anything from bare lips to a jet-powered compressor, but despite Stroustrup devoting eight pages to protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private kazoo destructors, never once in the 20-year standardization process did anyone notice there is no member function called play().

Re:Java?

[jd]

No, the Ada programming language is quite definitely a pollutant.