Programming

Depends in the goal.

If they are interested in Hardware, there is no better solution, than buying a hand full of cheap, "knock-off" Arduino Nano or RP2040 boards, a couple of LEDs and resistors and then let them Experiment with Arduino C, which teaches C programming in a fun and meaningful manner.

If they should get actual useful skill, start with Python. It's easy to learn. It's widely used for small, single-person projects, e.g. for gathering and analyzing data, running simulations, organizing something, interacting with APIs...

For any project, where I'd say, that it can be done quickly by a single person quickly on the side, Python is usually the best option. Even for experienced programmers. But especially for people that are new to programming or learning. It's easy, approachable and (because everything is handled by some library) quite safe to work with.

It's by far the most useful language for anyone that isn't a full software developer. And it's among the easiest to learn.

Also, when teaching Python, consider teaching with Jupyer documents. It immediately shows, what the short block of code is doing, instead of writing a huge and long script file, then executing it and struggling with debugging where students might not even know, how to start. An easy to host solution to supply Jupyer to a whole class is JupyterHub. If you aren't concerned about your students data, Google Colab is a JupyterHub for free.

And now, finally, if you want a course that has some practical use (e.g. data analysis and math stuff) while also doing fun things and being incredibly interactive because of the use of hardware... Well... It's python again.

Let them write a short branching story using Ren'Py. It's easy and will get them engaged. Go on and switch to Jupyter/Colab and do a bit of data scraping, data analysis/math or image filters. Basically introduce numpy, then pandas, then scipy, beautiful soup or openCV. Pure hard skills, that are applicable in many jobs. But realistically, due to time constraints in normal courses, all you want to do here, is numpy to get into it and automate math homework, followed by pandas, to load and automate excel files. And finally, let them do something with hardware, by programming a RP2040 in microPython. It's not as widely adopted as the Arduino ecosystem, but it's good enough for the simple stuff students will be able to learn, and you don't have to introduce a completely different language.

My high school AP computer science course in the ealry aughts taught C first.

I would start with Python. It's a fun language to learn, and generally recommended for beginners. Towards the end, I would spend a few sessions on c, not to teach them c but to give them an appreciation for what they get for free in higher level languages.

No way it's C. The average student will go home and find that they can't do much of anything they like, with the level of C they know. Even printing a string is famously hard in C, they'll hate it.

The average students wants to build games, websites, discord bots etc. Javascript makes it easy, none are easy in C. Nothing drains their interest in programming faster than segfaults.

Javascript is a horrible language, but it is ubiquitous. You'll want to spend a little time on html and css if you expect them to do more than print output.

You could focus on TypeScript, which will help them avoid some of the worst things, but then you spend more time on tooling and it won't just run in the browser console.

Python is a reasonably popular language with a good standard library. It has fewer bizarre quirks like adding two lists of ints together to get a string.

I wouldn't teach C to a general audience.

I'd start with logic, infrastructure and design first. Once that is locked in they can use any language to move forward as it's only syntax you need to learn once your logic and design is solid. I'd offer them a choice of three different languages to achieve the same end result of the assignment. This shows them the importance of logic and design and the transference of skills.

I don't know how old your students are, but there is also MIT Scratch.

• https://scratch.mit.edu/

Neither. Teach them Scheme. They need to start by building good habits (functional programming).

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso

Probably JS as the fact that every computer has by default everything you need to execute JS. But there is a bunch of browser stuff you have to worry about before you can do anything with it. I'm not sure how you learn JS before html.

With Python you can do simple command line stuff without having to really know anything else. You can learn one concept at a time.

That being said, people have a lot of familiarity with browsers and it might feel less abstract. JS might a better choice for demystifying coding. Python is probably a better choice for accomplishing anything useful.

After reading through some of the comments, here is my opinion.

C would be a good language IF you know your students plan to get into IT, specifically a sector where the low level knowledge is useful. Beyond that, I assume your students probably use windows and I personally always find it a pain to work with C on windows outside of full IDEs like jetbrains and Visual Studio. It's also a lot more work till you get some results that you are happy about. Unless you start with an Arduino, which I find pretty nice to get students interested in embedded stuff.

I don't like JavaScript because I find it a mess although it is very useful for anything web related.

Given you said in another comment that this is meant to be a general purpose skill for your students I would strongly recommend python. While I dislike the dynamic type system, it is a very powerful language to get stuff done. Also very useful outside of IT as a scripting language for analyzing data in basically any field or for generating nice plots for some document

Python. They'll only,learn bad patterns from JS.

If you also plan on teaching html and css, than I'd go for js first. Having your code instantly response in a visual way, is super motivating for most students.
If you just want to tech programming concepts, i'd go for python.
If you want this to be the start of a complete cs study, than you can start with C

I would go for something like Processing for students who are just trying to learn a bit of programming as an extra credit. The JS implementation is called p5.js. I would introduce a little bit of C later in the course once the students are familiar with basic programming concepts. That way you can show them what is happening behind the scenes without overwhelming them from the start.

Why not python? C needs constant memory management and JavaScript is too chaotic. Both seem to me a bit too complicated for someone just starting

What level are your students (primary school, high school, technical college, university)?

You said it's not a core skill, so what is their core skill? IT? Machinist? Electronics engineer?

C is an excellent "fundamentals" language that anyone with a software engineering and maybe computer science should have exposure too, but if their programming is purely practical (e.g. scripting for IT?) C is essentially irrelevant.

Javascript is very narrow in scope but if they're web designers then it's essential.

I'll back the other commenters that if they need a language they can do useful things in (e.g. simple automations, calculations), Python is hard to pass over.

I was taught a bit of C and still don't understand why. I see the use of C but it feels much too low level to be useful for the kinds of things I might want to do.

Python and JS are much more relatable.

If you want to help people develop a fundamental understanding of IT concepts, teach them Python. C is very hard for beginners and will discourage most people. JavaScript is too inconsistent. Python will let people get results quickly and that way encourage them to carry on. Plus, it's one of the most popular languages out there so Python skills are definitely useful in the labour market.

Dont teach anyone javascript. periodt

Go(lang)

I think JavaScript and web app development will be among the first programming jobs to be eaten by LLMs, and it's already a crowded field. I'm skeptical of that being a wise career move for newcomers today.

JS for sure.

It has a reputation among programmers as being a bit of a mess, but I think the reasons behind that reputation are largely irrelevant to your use case.

Basically:

1. It has some bad decisions about basic stuff, like truthiness, equality, coercion. But those aren’t major stumbling blocks, really. When they run into those situations, they’ll probably already be aware that they’re trying something weird and won’t have the same already-developed intuition about “how it should work” that many of us are bringing to the table.
2. Production deployment can easily turn into a Rube Goldberg machine. I think this is mostly what the kneejerk “really? JS?” response is about. Different ES versions, module systems, WASM, dependency hell, transpilers on top of transpilers, and a billion different runtimes. And the fact that everyone and their grandma apparently wants to build a custom DSL on top of JS that requires additional transpiler plugins or codegen steps. But your students won’t have to worry about that shit. Just pick one environment and do that. Maybe warn them that stackoverflow might use different syntax (require vs import) or try to import stuff that doesn’t exist in their environment though.

I would say C first. You need to learn the fundamentals:

• pointers
• allocation
• reference vs value
• recursion
• stack
• panics, errors, error propagation
• data structures

Many devs don't know it and they are honestly just clueless about anything they are doing. They just want to make it work.

JavaScript is just too high level, and makes you think you are immune to these low level concepts, but you are not.

And not only that, but also good practices, like:

• git
• linting
• types of tests and how to implement them
• working with third party dependencies