I second anonymized user 468275's response, as well as merlyn's. Perl is a wonderfully apt system-level 'glue' language. I don't have any experience using it on Windows, but on a UNIX/BSD/Linux platform it really rocks.

Speaking of which, you might consider opening up the question of programming environment as part of the 'what' and 'why'. When I was just learning bits and bytes -- literally, in 8086 machine language -- I read Kernighan & Pike's "The UNIX Programming Environment," and I said to myself, "WOW, that is neat! The OS is available to the program and vice versa," but all I had around me was bare hardware and DOS. It took me a lot of years before I was once again presented with UNIX in the form of a cheap commodity 486 PC box running FreeBSD 2.2.5 that juggled firewall, webserver, database and web site duties without a hiccup. Needless to say, many of the glue scripts as well as the web CGI were Perl. I fell in love with FreeBSD and Perl, and have looked with disfavor at anything M$ ever since, knowing now what computer power really is all about: direct access to the resources.

I think the best way to intorduce programming is to get students' hands on a computer, or, at the least, have a local box set up with a projection monitor. The only language I think would be problematic to demonstrate on a vanilla FreeBSD box would be APL, which is obsolete anyway, but just about everything else is freely available in the Ports Collection. Java current is also a little strange due to Sun's reticience, so I'll give the nod to Linux for that one, but FreeBSD is so much more sane and stable than Linux in so many other ways that I find it well worth a little extra effort for Java.

Start with shell scripts and system glue (like Perl), take a side trip through application and web programming (also possible with Perl), and end up with programming abstractions (yep, Perl again) and IDEs like Smalltalk. IMHO, many instructors do it backwards, starting with toy problems and ignoring the real world tasks like turning the lights on.

When I was volunteering with 10-year-old kids, that was one of my prime themes: showing how programming concepts were the same whether controlling a disk drive or simulating a neural network. The importance of creating an understanding of the relatedness and layered-ness of all computing in a newbie can't be overstated, and it's easy to do when you can sit down at a console with root access.

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