
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
I think a hobbiest programmer (i.e,, kid), would be best served using one of the popular scripting languages first. Usually easier to debug, interpreter can be used interactivly, and it's easier to get up and running with your simple programs.