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Free edition of Delphi.

I'd highly consider teaching Delphi for beginners. Why? Because it is easy for beginners to grasp, and as the student progresses, you can teach them about memory management, pointers, references, inline assembly, etc. Check out this site for some great tutorials and resources (http://delphibasics.co.uk/). Also, you can download Turbo Delphi for FREE here: http://www.turboexplorer.com/downloads The beauty of Delphi is that it is easy to get into, and also very very powerful. I believe it is also a great foundation for moving to other languages, like C++ or even C#. Regards

If you're on Mac/Linux, start coding in Python (http://www.python.org/). It's a simple, powerful, and flexible language which you can do a lot with. Basic Python program:

print "Hello, World!"

Yeah, that was the whole thing.

If you're on Windows, get Python anyway, or get the .Net framework runtime. I'm guessing you already know that .Net is Microsoft's answer to Java, and they're aggressively pushing it out to their whole software developer ecosystem. In fact Vista comes installed with the latest version. If you're on XP or earlier, you might already have a slightly earlier version of .Net installed. If you have it, then there'll be a C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework folder in your computer.

If you don't, you can get the latest version from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=333325fd-ae52-4e35-b531-508d977d32a6&DisplayLang=en).

Once you have it, you can run all applications written in .Net, and you can write and run your own apps.

Here is where it gets interesting. To write programs for .Net, you can pick and choose from several languages. The framework itself comes with support for Visual Basic.NET, C#, JavaScript.NET, and C++. Since you mentioned coding cool stuff with Basic, let me mention that I used to write cool stuff (arguably :-) in QBasic as well back on Windows 98. But anyway, you can now write in Visual Basic, which has been upgraded to leverage all of .Net's power. Here's a basic (hah) graphical interface VB.NET program:

Imports System.Windows.Forms

Public Class Hello_World
    Public Shared Sub Main()
        MessageBox.Show("Hello, World!")
    End Sub
End Class

To compile and run, type:

E:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\vbc test.vb .\test.exe

at a command prompt, where `test.vb' is the file wherein you have saved the source code.

Now, Microsoft offers free versions of its flagship Visual Studio developer products which make it very, very easy for you to code, especially nice graphical interfaces. And you can find those by doing a search for `visual studio' in the Microsoft website. But I will argue against it until you're moderately comfortable with a language and have in fact compiled and run some graphical programs which you coded yourself from top to bottom. The reason is that Visual Studio and its ilk automate so much of what you would do that if you start there, at best you'll never even learn of all those aspects of programming, and at worst you'll be thoroughly confused by what it does. This is what happened to me, for example, when I tried to dabble with writing MFC (Microsoft's previous attempt at making graphical interfaces easy) applications in Visual Studio 6 way back when.

Having said that, I've heard some really nice things about Borland Delphi, which is a more powerful version of Pascal which is said to be really fast as well. And it's a full-fledged development environment like Visual Studio, with support for code completion and all that. But, it's only available for Windows AFAIK. You can get it (free) at http://www.turboexplorer.com/, and check out some really awesome Flash videos they have up on http://www.turboexplorer.com/delphi/videos, where they take you step by step from no knowledge of programming to creating full-blown graphical apps with Delphi.

From what I know, the above are basically ways of creating rich-client GUI programs. Of course, there's a lot more to programming. If you don't want to download anything, just get Firefox and start hacking away in JavaScript/CSS and create some cool Web 2.0 apps in a single HTML file.

If you're on Mac/Linux, start coding in Python (http://www.python.org/). It's a simple, powerful, and flexible language which you can do a lot with. Basic Python program:

print "Hello, World!"

Yeah, that was the whole thing.

If you're on Windows, get Python anyway, or get the .Net framework runtime. I'm guessing you already know that .Net is Microsoft's answer to Java, and they're aggressively pushing it out to their whole software developer ecosystem. In fact Vista comes installed with the latest version. If you're on XP or earlier, you might already have a slightly earlier version of .Net installed. If you have it, then there'll be a C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework folder in your computer.

If you don't, you can get the latest version from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=333325fd-ae52-4e35-b531-508d977d32a6&DisplayLang=en).

Once you have it, you can run all applications written in .Net, and you can write and run your own apps.

Here is where it gets interesting. To write programs for .Net, you can pick and choose from several languages. The framework itself comes with support for Visual Basic.NET, C#, JavaScript.NET, and C++. Since you mentioned coding cool stuff with Basic, let me mention that I used to write cool stuff (arguably :-) in QBasic as well back on Windows 98. But anyway, you can now write in Visual Basic, which has been upgraded to leverage all of .Net's power. Here's a basic (hah) graphical interface VB.NET program:

Imports System.Windows.Forms

Public Class Hello_World
    Public Shared Sub Main()
        MessageBox.Show("Hello, World!")
    End Sub
End Class

To compile and run, type:

E:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\vbc test.vb .\test.exe

at a command prompt, where `test.vb' is the file wherein you have saved the source code.

Now, Microsoft offers free versions of its flagship Visual Studio developer products which make it very, very easy for you to code, especially nice graphical interfaces. And you can find those by doing a search for `visual studio' in the Microsoft website. But I will argue against it until you're moderately comfortable with a language and have in fact compiled and run some graphical programs which you coded yourself from top to bottom. The reason is that Visual Studio and its ilk automate so much of what you would do that if you start there, at best you'll never even learn of all those aspects of programming, and at worst you'll be thoroughly confused by what it does. This is what happened to me, for example, when I tried to dabble with writing MFC (Microsoft's previous attempt at making graphical interfaces easy) applications in Visual Studio 6 way back when.

Having said that, I've heard some really nice things about Borland Delphi, which is a more powerful version of Pascal which is said to be really fast as well. And it's a full-fledged development environment like Visual Studio, with support for code completion and all that. But, it's only available for Windows AFAIK. You can get it (free) at http://www.turboexplorer.com/, and check out some really awesome Flash videos they have up on http://www.turboexplorer.com/delphi/videos, where they take you step by step from no knowledge of programming to creating full-blown graphical apps with Delphi.

From what I know, the above are basically ways of creating rich-client GUI programs. Of course, there's a lot more to programming. If you don't want to download anything, just get Firefox and start hacking away in JavaScript/CSS and create some cool Web 2.0 apps in a single HTML file.

Have you ever used Delphi or C++Builder? The .NET API and the Borland Visual Component Library (VCL) were built by the same guy. .NET has the advantage of being his 2nd iteration, and C# the second iteration of Java, so his team had a chance to work the kinks out... Still, C++Builder/Delphi were vastly superior IDEs to VB6, not to mention that they didn't require programming in VB... (gag)

Borland has even released a free (as in beer) version called Turbo C++ Explorer. Not expandable like the original C++Builder from a few years ago, but still very nice for writing simple Win32 apps. Installation can be a pain, but if you make it through that, you'll notice many similarities between its VCL and the .NET APIs.

p.s. Yes, I'm a Borland fanboy.. 8-)

Long ago I took university level classes in Assembler, COBOL, Basic, Fortran, C and Pascal. Pascal was still common as a "teaching language" in the 1970s and 80s. I always preferred Pascal and got hooked when Borland shipped the TurboPascal compilers.
I use a variety of languages now (including Delphi) but I still think that Pascal is a great FIRST language for someone to learn. Sure, C and Perl are powerful, but its hard to claim that they are intuitive to the newbie.
http://www.delphiforfun.org/ is an absolutely awesome resource for young programmers. I don't want to slashdot the poor guy, but this obscure note in the comments shouldn't overwhelm him too much... He has tons of programs that cover a wide variety of problems and concepts. Many are visually interesting. All have source code and great documentation. I've watched the site grow in content over the years. I think it could provide the majority of content for a beginner's level programming class, but it is also great as a simple resource for a new (or young) programmer to go investigate.
So what do you use to compile these programs? http://www.turboexplorer.com/ free download

Are these available for download?

Well, there's that
    27 days, 9 hrs, 40 mins, 30 secs
    until the Turbo(s) are here!
timer there. Might explain the missing download links. :*)