They're isn't a perfect answer to this. All computer languages are wretched in their own special way. If this is just an intro I'd go with practical over pedantic.
If it's a relatively short class, I'd start them with Python. It has enough structure to give them a good idea of real world programming and for those who take to it, it's a language that they can run on their home computer. If you're really ambitious you could cobble together a PyGame sandbox for them to play in.
If you'll have multiple days with them, let them cut their teeth on Python, then throw them a curve for one day. Let them use Lisp just to show them another way to think.
Squeak has a nice graphic front end if you know your way around Smalltalk, but not may people use it.
As for problems, check out simple games. I'll second David Ahl's "Basic Computer Games". Also, puzzles like the "Cannibal/Missionary" problem are more fun that factorials.
If I ever see programs like cp become bloated with X library calls because some news reporter needs to see a GUI progress bar, I'm going to be very angry.
You got it backwards.
The cp command should still work pretty much as it does, perhaps with some verbose option that is easily parsed. Then a cp wrapper could be written in some thin scripting language, which would then call the regular cp command at the back end.
The command line user looses nothing and the window based person gets an easier interface.
despite it's (C's) incarnations (or deformations, depending on who you believe) still king, and it was designed in 1972.
A lot of that is inertia, hubris and "real" programmers unwilling to leave 1985.
C is the lowest common denominator. If I want to talk to a low level library, or pop up a window then you can almost always trust there to be a C interface. If the proper interfaces existed for higher level languages then it would be safer to use them. My current alpha rant http://upcracky.blogspot.com/2008/10/do-you-see-what-i-see.html goes into more detail about this. It's starting to drive me nuts.
In C you can write blindly fast code, but it comes at the expense of wasted slices of a finite lifetime. You gain speed, but you usually don't need it. Computers are faster than ever and, for many programs, they spend most of their time sitting idle waiting for a human to hit a key or click a mouse.
C has more space for picky little bugs (like memory management). Unfortunately we "real" programmers take great pride in finding these little nits. We should spend less time taking pride in nit hunting and more time asking why we're wasting our monkey cycles on languages that have us do what a computer can do better.
C also has a good, free, popular compiler. Now that Java has open sourced we my see C get some competition in the daemon field. Secure daemons are more important that fast ones.
However, if I wrote any sort of interactive application, a scripting language would not be my first choice. To me, it basically boils down to this: a "job" that cranks off, does it's own thing, and then ends, is a very good candidate for a scripted language. For an "application", I'm probably going to crack out C or C++ to tackle that one.
You should check out the modern state of GUI and scripting languages. Both PyGTK and Perl::Gtk2 are great for writing GUI apps, and are a lot easier than C/C++.
They really shine on smaller apps.
I actually have a rant about this outdated view on scripts and GUIs at <ShamelessPlug>upcracky.blogspot.com</ShamelessPlug>./p
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They're isn't a perfect answer to this. All computer languages are wretched in their own special way. If this is just an intro I'd go with practical over pedantic.
If it's a relatively short class, I'd start them with Python. It has enough structure to give them a good idea of real world programming and for those who take to it, it's a language that they can run on their home computer. If you're really ambitious you could cobble together a PyGame sandbox for them to play in.
If you'll have multiple days with them, let them cut their teeth on Python, then throw them a curve for one day. Let them use Lisp just to show them another way to think.
Squeak has a nice graphic front end if you know your way around Smalltalk, but not may people use it.
As for problems, check out simple games. I'll second David Ahl's "Basic Computer Games". Also, puzzles like the "Cannibal/Missionary" problem are more fun that factorials.
If I ever see programs like cp become bloated with X library calls because some news reporter needs to see a GUI progress bar, I'm going to be very angry.
You got it backwards.
The cp command should still work pretty much as it does, perhaps with some verbose option that is easily parsed. Then a cp wrapper could be written in some thin scripting language, which would then call the regular cp command at the back end.
The command line user looses nothing and the window based person gets an easier interface.
The need for a window aware scripting language is one of my current rants.
despite it's (C's) incarnations (or deformations, depending on who you believe) still king, and it was designed in 1972.
A lot of that is inertia, hubris and "real" programmers unwilling to leave 1985.
C is the lowest common denominator. If I want to talk to a low level library, or pop up a window then you can almost always trust there to be a C interface. If the proper interfaces existed for higher level languages then it would be safer to use them. My current alpha rant http://upcracky.blogspot.com/2008/10/do-you-see-what-i-see.html goes into more detail about this. It's starting to drive me nuts.
In C you can write blindly fast code, but it comes at the expense of wasted slices of a finite lifetime. You gain speed, but you usually don't need it. Computers are faster than ever and, for many programs, they spend most of their time sitting idle waiting for a human to hit a key or click a mouse.
C has more space for picky little bugs (like memory management). Unfortunately we "real" programmers take great pride in finding these little nits. We should spend less time taking pride in nit hunting and more time asking why we're wasting our monkey cycles on languages that have us do what a computer can do better.
C also has a good, free, popular compiler. Now that Java has open sourced we my see C get some competition in the daemon field. Secure daemons are more important that fast ones.
However, if I wrote any sort of interactive application, a scripting language would not be my first choice. To me, it basically boils down to this: a "job" that cranks off, does it's own thing, and then ends, is a very good candidate for a scripted language. For an "application", I'm probably going to crack out C or C++ to tackle that one.
You should check out the modern state of GUI and scripting languages. Both PyGTK and Perl::Gtk2 are great for writing GUI apps, and are a lot easier than C/C++.
They really shine on smaller apps.
I actually have a rant about this outdated view on scripts and GUIs at <ShamelessPlug>upcracky.blogspot.com</ShamelessPlug>./p