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I essentially started with BASIC at a summer college program when I was 8 or 9. I don't know what language we used there, but it was on Macs at the school, and they focused mostly on drawing patterns on the screen. Of course, at that time, my partner and I accidentally figured out how to move a box around the screen and have the foreground and background switch through a list of different colors in seizure-inducing style. Some of us also programmed boxes that would race each other, a random one winning each time, and other such things. For a first exposure to programming, I still support BASIC, even though I wouldn't use it unless the project warranted it, any more.

After that was over, I used Liberty BASIC for some time. Liberty BASIC is actually an awesome language to get a good footing in on programming as well, and one I really recommend for just beginning to learn programming. It's simple, and you can get to doing some rather basic things in it rather quickly, while having a good chance at getting your foot in the door at some of the thought process and other things you'll be using later on in more advanced languages. It's got some good sprite stuff for simple 2D graphics and such, making it rather attractive if you want to show him how to make a game, but it also begins in command line (something that the *nix lover in me loves, especially when Liberty BASIC is Windows).

It was after that, that I switched to VB (pre-.NET). After playing with VB6, specifically, for a while, then I finally began learning C/C++ when I was 15 or 16. I can't say that I regret the path I followed there at all; C/C++ introduced a challenge, but I had a lot of the basics down in BASIC style syntax already. Of course, at 8, I was also playing with HTML and Javascript (specifically, for here, the latter), which gave me a little lead into the C-style syntax, and made the whole transition relatively easy.

Though, I have to throw in my tidbit of I still support learning ASM somewhere along the way. I never got great at ASM or anything, as I only wanted to do it for learning purposes, and so I did a lot of just embedding it in C/C++ code. However, the lessons that ASM taught me are invaluable every time I sit down to program, as it got me thinking of how the computer is actually working with what I tell it to do. As low level as C might be, it still has a good amount of abstraction over ASM, and I found my code to get cleaner in C after playing with ASM a decent amount. Of course, now, I'd struggle to make a program in ASM again, as I'd have to relearn quite a bit, but the goal was learning and gaining another perspective. And several, even higher-level languages have bits and pieces that can be great for that purpose, beyond just being useful in their own respects.

Isn't Liberty Basic avalible as a free download?

http://www.libertybasic.com/

Liberty Basic motto: "It's too Complicated, It's too Expensive, It's not Approachable" is, I think, designed exactly for easy spin up by novices. There are also some teaching languages out there if you search for them.

I'm a very satisfied customer of Liberty Basic. Their free version is all you'll need. I do serial port GUIs with LB all day every day. http://www.libertybasic.com/ MUCH simpler than VB, .NET, C# or almost any of the others, but still gives you a complete GUI experience. The helpfile and exapmle code make it trivial to cook up code quickly. Try it out -

This is a mock auction. Bidder with the highest feature set at the lowest price wins. I'll place first bid:

Liberty BASIC compiler for $50. Do I hear $45?

I was faced with a similar situation when my fourth and fifth grade children wanted to know what computer programming was all about. I found an adaptatoin of the original PC BASIC language (Liberty Basic) that runs in the windowns GUI environment. It is easy to learn and implements a wide variety of programming constructs (I/O, conditional statements, looping, math, graphics, etc.). I loaded it on the family PC for the kids to play with. My son eventually wrote some of his own programs to generate solutions to the "The Traveling Salesman" problem for a grade school science project. See LibertyBasic

I don't get it.

-Carl Gundel, author of Liberty BASIC
http://www.libertybasic.com