Woo! That's the spirit!

...I don't like BASIC.
~ducks tomatoes/rocks surely being hurled~
I just mean, in order to introduce people to programming, you don't HAVE to use it. Show them console programs, echoing, then adding, then doing Fibonacci numbers, then blackjack... it's really not any more "fancy" than Basic if you're doing it right. (Just don't do Visual Whatever - those are the worst!)

Then, you can tell them more about how each thing is working lower down - maybe just gloss over compilation with something like, "What you type gets converted from English to numbers that the computer can understand" - since, for one function programs, that's pretty much all that's involved (what's a optimizing compiler?)...
You can delve as deep as you need to, but it's important to give people something they can work with at the same time. BASIC's syntax has also become a little arcane. Start them with C/C++/Java/Python, I say.

It's not a problem with any one language, it's just a sad shift in the teaching style.

For the record, I started with Visual Basic at ~7, made a program to calculate Pi using the Leibniz formula, tried Java, couldn't get the compiler to work, dropped programming for a couple years, made a Cellular Automata program in Javascript (you give it the rule number and range, it draws it), learned Java with more vim because I wanted speed, decided to go back to my Java book to learn it well, realized I already knew it all, did a ton of USACO problems to get good, realized that I hated Visual Basic now, learned C++ (or at least the parts I wanted to i.e. manual memory management) learned Haskell (or the parts I wanted to i.e. craps of recursion/currying, now I'm learning ASM and designing a CPU with my friend for Minecraft.

So that's my bias, just FYI.

You may now proceed to to hit me. Hard.

Yeah, my C++ class, as of yet, has not moved out of the console. The worst was the chapter where he had us use the borland graphics library. (Don't look it up, think MS paint for C++ )

Actually, I emailed the teacher about it and he said I could skip the chapter! I took the exact same class

hehe yeah, they're always more drawn by the games than the math help. Although, I have had one convert who made an (albeit short) choose your own adventure thing with chuck norris

Actually, I emailed the teacher about it and he said I could skip the chapter! I took the exact same class

oh that's right, you live in utah too. forgot about that

...I don't like BASIC.
~ducks tomatoes/rocks surely being hurled~
I just mean, in order to introduce people to programming, you don't HAVE to use it. Show them console programs, echoing, then adding, then doing Fibonacci numbers, then blackjack... it's really not any more "fancy" than Basic if you're doing it right. (Just don't do Visual Whatever - those are the worst!)

Then, you can tell them more about how each thing is working lower down - maybe just gloss over compilation with something like, "What you type gets converted from English to numbers that the computer can understand" - since, for one function programs, that's pretty much all that's involved (what's a optimizing compiler?)...
You can delve as deep as you need to, but it's important to give people something they can work with at the same time. BASIC's syntax has also become a little arcane. Start them with C/C++/Java/Python, I say.

I learned programming with GW-BASIC and later QBasic, and I have since then never seen a programming language that beats QBasic for starting out.

C and its derivatives are awful first languages IMO because of how difficult it can be to debug problems. Write past the end of an array in C and the program will usually crash in some completely unrelated place; do the same in Basic and you'll get a "Subscript out of range" error on the exact line of the problem. I was an impatient kid; if I had started out with a C family programming language I probably would have given up on programming.

A problem with starting with Java and Python is they force you to use pointers all over the place (and they don't make this fact obvious) - in Java, a "Foo x;" variable doesn't really hold a Foo object, it holds a pointer to a Foo object, and in Python, every variable holds a pointer. I constantly see new programmers having trouble because they're confusing pointers with the objects they point to - which is very understandable when the language doesn't even make it clear that you're working with pointers. Just imagine being a beginning programmer trying to explain something like this:
>>> a = [1, 1]
>>> b = [a, a]
>>> b
[[1, 1], [1, 1]]
>>> b[0][0] = 2
>>> b
[[2, 1], [2, 1]]
Basic didn't have any pointer variables (well technically, string variables held a pointer, but since it was impossible to make two string variables point to the same string, this fact didn't cause trouble for the programmer). But it did have arrays (including real multidimensional arrays, something sorely missing in Java and Python). Any structure you might think you need pointers for - linked lists, binary trees, etc - can be done almost as easily with arrays; the downside is that you're stuck with a fixed array size, but when you're starting out, you don't really care about scalability. The great thing about arrays is that they're intuitive - even a beginner can understand that "I" isn't the same thing as "A(I)", and it's possible that "A(I)=A(J)" even when "I<>J". And once you've mastered arrays, pointers are easy - they're just indexes into that giant array we call "memory".