[vannevar]

I was just considering this question myself. I'm teaching programming to a friend with no experience at all. I finally settled on Lua, even though I don't know it myself. The syntax is clean, it's a compact language, and once she learns it she could use it in gaming, which she's into. My runner-up was Ruby. Python would be good too, though I think the significant whitespace is a distracting pitfall for absolute beginners.