[orclev]

JS is a necessary evil. It's one of the worst languages in terms of design (beaten only by PHP and obscure languages no ones heard of). Learning it as your first language is going to gain you very little since almost none of that knowledge is translatable into other languages, and you're likely to have picked up a bunch of really bad habits from it. Further making matters worse is that there are tons of really really really really really bad JS code snippets floating around the internet, things that make professional programmers want to gouge their eyes out just looking at them, and for a newbie who doesn't know any better they're just as likely to assume that writing code like that is actually an acceptable thing to do.

In terms of a first language, nearly anything is going to beat JS in terms of learning useful things from it. The fact that we're stuck with JS now and you're going to need to learn it at some point doesn't mean you should expose a newbie to something like that, it will take them years to fix the damage that would do, it's like starting them at net negative in programming knowledge.