Python, definitely.

It’s easy. Succinct. You can use any text editor. Has a huge community. Huge library.

I would suggest taking a look at Scheme or Clojure for somebody who has no development experience. The big reasons being that these are high level languages so you can focus on learning the actual concepts without all the incidental complexity of imperative languages. Scheme in particular was designed as a teaching language. The other aspect is interactivity, Lisps have a tight integration between the editor and the REPL and you can evaluate functions as you write them. This is incredibly helpful for learning as you can write a function, send it for evaluation, and see the result immediately. So you can play with code and get an intuition for how things work.

Python.

• It’s pretty easy to get going.
• the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
• you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
• it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
• the standard library is very good.

You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.

Use Google Collab or another web hosted platform. If you’re unfamiliar Google Collab is a part of Google docs that you can run Jupyter Notebooks on (and it’s free). This avoids the need for anyone to install anything and means you can test materials in the same environment everyone will run against.

Additionally, Jupyter notebooks makes it easy to add markdown, so instructions can be in stylized format and the students can run the cells over and over again to see how the output changes in real time.

Lastly, I would lean towards python, but there are many different languages supported in Google Collab and similar web hosted tools.

Scratch, teach them Scratch. It runs in a browser, it’s designed as a teaching language, teach them Scratch.

surely every OS comes with a C compiler pre-installed? You would be mistaken.

I suggest having your students install IntelliJ IDEA and using Java. A full blown IDE might be much but I can’t think of an easier way to install a JDK and an editor suited for it.

C is full of complex paradigms and low level details that are great if you’re learning computer architectures, but pretty bad if it’s your first languages.

Python in the other hand is great to learn programming practices and for quick, non-optimized, easy scripts. I think it’s less suited for more complex projects, but that’s another thing. I honestly fon’t think it’s a great language, but it’s easy to use and has pretty much a library for everything, that’s why I think it’s good to start and for simple things.

Java is also quite high level, so also good for beginners, but I’ve never used it so I don’t know how easy is to setup (python is) and how easy it is to download dependencies (on python it is).

For your case I would say Python is best.

I’d be surprised if MS Windows came with a C compiler, tbh. But it’d be a bad choice for non-technical people anyway; it’s not exactly a user-friendly language…

Python would’ve been my choice, but maybe also consider Lua (a lot of games include it as their scripting language, which might be an easy selling point for people)

What’s your target audience ? An what’s the goal ?

There is a difference between Giving a programming training to scientist/engineer who may need more than just Excel for data-processing/visualisation, and giving a discovery what programming looks-like for a general public, or people who want to do their own website.

For general public, the good-old “Logo” that kids learned programming with in the 70-90’s is still great

for scientists engineer, I would go for python which is the de-facto standard for data visualisation/processing when performance doesn’t matter

For a more foundation course, I think the everything is object approach in java can be pretty great

Scratch?

Python 100%. It’s the most human readable and easiest to pick up, especially for a non tech person. It’s easy to setup contrary to what I’ve read in the comments. Go to python.org install the latest version and that’s it. The downloader includes Idle so no other ide is required, but I’d consider vscode as well. Either watch an install video or better yet do it yourself before going to class.

I think you need to highlight the differences between OSs when it comes to setup if you plan on having a mixed environment of systems. It will also affect the code you write, so to be thorough, you’ll need to cover those differences as well.

Don’t go low level like C. These people will die the first time they have to compile in terminal.

Rust

I would suggest Go

I’m currently a college student studying software engineering, so by no means am I a professional (yet at least, lol). Nevertheless, I’ll try to give what input I can.

Afaik and based on my own experiences, windows does not come with a pre-installed C compiler. (Win 11 Home at least) Also, I just honestly wouldn’t recommend C anyways especially if it’s for a non-technical crowd. It’s great once you get the hang of it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s definitely not beginner friendly.

As for a “best choice” it’s of course up to preference, what you’re already familiar with, and what kind of programs you and your class plan on writing. If you want to use a language that can directly translate into a working environment, Python is a very beginner friendly option. If you want something slightly less forgiving, I think Java provides a good balance between having a lot of useful built in functions/methods and having some of the more “strict” (for lack of a better term) rules about syntax (semicolons, brackets, static variables) that you’ll find in other languages. If you’re just looking to teach programming concepts on a surface/conceptual level then honestly something like code.org or scratch is a great option (and it’s where I got my start growing up lol)

As for setting up an environment, again, everyone has their own idea of the absolute best setup, and it’s also probably going to differ at least somewhat depending on what operating system you’re using. For my personal use I’ve mostly been using VSCode just because it’s pretty easy to set up. Definitely worth mentioning though that VSCode comes with plenty of Microsoft Telemetry built in by default so if you want an alternative without that I recommend Code OSS (vscode built directly from source) or VSCodium (vscode but with MS Telemetry disabled and a different default extension marketplace)

The intro to computer science class I took (and am currently an aid for) at university (we used C) did all of their demonstrations using CS50.dev, which is an online environment maintained by Harvard. For the Object Oriented Programming course I took (Java) we used Eclipse.

Again, I’m still a student, so take everything here with a grain of salt. And if anyone sees anything they think deserves clarification/correction please let me know. I’m still learning lol.