The First Programming Language

I teach academic courses for nearly 25 years. During those years many of my colleagues have approached me asking which programming language do I recommend for beginners to start with. My answer usually was that it is more important to ask what are the theoretical topics that will be taught than which tool (meaning, the programming language) we are going to use. After all, we can use different programming languages for teaching the very same theoretical topics. Nevertheless, during that last few years, I couldn’t ignore the amazing simplicity of the Python programming language. Having said that, it is no wonder that most of the top universities in the USA choose to use Python in their introductory courses for computer science. Doing so, most of the time spent on learning can be used for learning the theoretical topics instead of coping with annoying technical problems related to the grammar rules of the programming language that was selected.