HTML is not too exciting. When I first learned it, it reminded me of the old days of putting in escape characters to send messages to the printer, do you guys remember those days
Javascript is fun and I think an excellent language to teach. But the syntax can be daunting. I think Lua is really neat and clean and very BASIC like actually. It is even cleaner than Python in my opinion.
I guess they should ask the kids where they hope to end up, in the gaming industry, university professor, web programming and select the first language accordingly. Java fits the bill on many levels but again the syntax can be tough. I have watched some University Courses on Introduction to Programming Videos and many of them make their own Java based language that makes doing initial things as easy as Basic, then a few lectures later they show how that code was written in Java moving the kids into it that way.
In the Stanford videos, they did the same with c++. They made their own graphics, data containers, input and output routines that really make it fun to program in c++. I wish the code was open source, it would be great to study and see how they did what they did.
A cross platform Oxygen will be the ideal language for anything and be the only language anyone needs in the future!!
