One still hear's tones of regret that the good old days are over, when one's choice of a first year computer language was obvious: Algol or Pascal. Today there's no such consensus (if there ever was), but another question is "should we have learning languages?" There was a time when it was considered intuitive that languages not used in the "real world" could be all that much more powerful as educational tools because weighted to "learner" needs. BASIC was one of those languages, and we may argue that it gave birth to the PC era, which is what gave rise to the *nix explosion (aka the "dot com bomb") as a follow-on event.** But is the Darwinian process that winnows the field to but a few languages also giving us more learnable ones? Consider Grace, a new language in development for the express purpose of teaching object oriented programming to students. Why not use Python? Python lacks compile time type checking. Is that bad? It's a subject of religious wars. Note how the voices beneath the main question worry about it's "subjective" nature: code for it's potential to inspire "flame wars": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/125367/dynamic-type-languages-versus-stat... The answer that's eventually accepted takes the approach of reserving scorn for extremists in both camps. Kirby ** of course "dot com bomb" sounds bad for business whereas the *Nix revolution paved the way for the Free Web and free just about everything. New businesses depend on "going viral" i.e. the infinite replicability of binary objects is the key to their success, versus failure (a big turnaround in some industries)