[geeks] Introductory programming language?

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Mouse wrote:
> I'm not looking for hairy power or theoretical elegance here, or I'd be
> going with C or Lisp or some such; I'm looking for (a) simple, but not
> dumbed down to the point of being unable to do basic things and (b)
> powerful enough to do minimally useful things relatively easily, so as
> to get that "hey, I got something working!" buzz.  I think awk was a
> good choice, and if there's a decent implementation for Windows I'll be
> tempted to go that route again.  But it occurs to me that there may
> well be better languages out there.
>
> Any thoughts?

I know you're not looking for theoretical elegance, but if you're 
looking at a Microsoft-specific programming language that is broadly 
similar to non-Microsoft-specific programming language, I'd suggest F#. 
  There's definitely plenty of theoretical elegance there.  And I've 
always liked Standard ML and OCaml.  It doesn't really teach a lot of 
bad habits like certain other languages I could name.

Peace...  Sridhar