A brief history of choosing first programming languages

Abstract

Choosing the best computer language for introducing students to programming is often an emotional issue, leading to protracted debates for many years. This paper aims to document how the development of programming languages has influenced the educational processes of choosing an introductory language since the early days of computing, by exploring some of the "programming languages that have been selected over the last couple of decades and the rational for those selections". © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.