COBOL! I'm not entirely joking. There are important legacy systems using COBOL that simply refuse to die--unlike the aging COBOL programmers who maintain them. I bet there would be many organizations that would love to find a young COBOL expert.
On a more serious note, Lua could be a good option. It is a clean, simple, but powerful language, and it is used to script many games. I could see a kid enjoying learning programming by writing Warcraft add-ons.
Javascript (the good parts) might be reasonable. A web browser then provides a nice interactive environment the kid can program.
I wonder if a case could be made for something like Haskell? The idea there would be that it is a powerful, concise language, but that many people have trouble learning it after they have learned more conventional languages. So why not start with Haskell, before the mind has been trained to not think in a Haskell-compatible way? (Same argument could be made for several other languages besides Haskell).
On a more serious note, Lua could be a good option. It is a clean, simple, but powerful language, and it is used to script many games. I could see a kid enjoying learning programming by writing Warcraft add-ons.
Javascript (the good parts) might be reasonable. A web browser then provides a nice interactive environment the kid can program.
I wonder if a case could be made for something like Haskell? The idea there would be that it is a powerful, concise language, but that many people have trouble learning it after they have learned more conventional languages. So why not start with Haskell, before the mind has been trained to not think in a Haskell-compatible way? (Same argument could be made for several other languages besides Haskell).