Exposing children to C and/or C++ should be considered abuse. :)
No need for an emoticon there! C in the hands of an inexperienced programmer is a recipe for disaster!
Lego or smalltalk, pharo smalltalk has its own IDE so everything is in 1 place
Unless there's now a "Lego" programming language (news to me), could you possibly mean LOGO? Never used it myself, but but I've certainly heard good things about it. And if you're going to expose first-time programmers to ANY C-derived language, Java would be the one to expose them to.
Be that as it may, IBM VS-BASIC, on a 370-135 running the McGill University MUSIC operating system was good enough for me (and at home, I'm working on a project in M$ QuickBASIC Extended for DOS, that marks the first time I've touched a BASIC derivative in decades.)
(I miss PL/I.) -- JHHL