I'm from Europe. At my High School there was taught Pascal, Assembler and JavaScript. Pascal was used to teach classic imperative Programming as well as OOP. Later we switched from Turbo-Pascal to Delphi.
The introductory CS-lectures at my university taught the Lisp-dialect Scheme which is great for learning functional and imperative programming as well as OOP and other advanced concepts like "higher order programming" and building interpreters. We used Scheme to program an assembler simulator and used this assembler to implement Scheme.
I don't think C++ or Java are the best choices for beginners because with these languages you tent to think less in concepts but more language-specific. It's easier to switch from Scheme to C++ than the other way round.
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I'm from Europe. At my High School there was taught Pascal, Assembler and JavaScript. Pascal was used to teach classic imperative Programming as well as OOP. Later we switched from Turbo-Pascal to Delphi. The introductory CS-lectures at my university taught the Lisp-dialect Scheme which is great for learning functional and imperative programming as well as OOP and other advanced concepts like "higher order programming" and building interpreters. We used Scheme to program an assembler simulator and used this assembler to implement Scheme. I don't think C++ or Java are the best choices for beginners because with these languages you tent to think less in concepts but more language-specific. It's easier to switch from Scheme to C++ than the other way round.