[pashields]

I can't agree with this. It's true that many languages work well as starters, but there are certainly some that don't. I think java is a classicly bad first language. There is a lot of ceremony which will take you a considerable amount of time to understand (public static void main) and it's also heavy handed on object orientation. Whether these things are useful in long run is debatable, but it's an amazing amount of conceptual overhead. Worse, unlike the overhead of low-level language like C, the pain in a language like Java comes from complex abstractions. Understanding pointers is difficult for many people, but it's mostly based on whether you understand how in memory storage works. There's a more straight forward path to that than to understanding the how/why of OO.