Kids(and anyone without the preexisting motivation to try the harder problems of programming, which would include most adults too) will want something with a lot of immediate responsiveness and simple failure modes. This rules out languages needing "build systems" of any kind, languages that require hooking up a "foobar library" to do anything but console output, and languages with obscure error messages and ample means of shooting oneself in the foot.
HTML/CSS mixed with a little bit of JS is roughly equivalent to learning BASIC these days - you can throw something on the screen quickly, and add bits of functionality from there. Since errors throw exceptions, they're pretty easy to understand, and with the newer HTML features there's tons of room to grow into different domains. Plus there's a zillion resources for JS coding out there.
A good alternative, if the kids in question are not old enough to care about the prestige factor of "real" languages yet(an issue as you get near the teen years), is Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/ It reduces syntax to drag-and-drop while retaining some key concepts that bridge the gap into more powerful languages(conditional branches, named variables, and list manipulation)
HTML/CSS mixed with a little bit of JS is roughly equivalent to learning BASIC these days - you can throw something on the screen quickly, and add bits of functionality from there. Since errors throw exceptions, they're pretty easy to understand, and with the newer HTML features there's tons of room to grow into different domains. Plus there's a zillion resources for JS coding out there.
A good alternative, if the kids in question are not old enough to care about the prestige factor of "real" languages yet(an issue as you get near the teen years), is Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/ It reduces syntax to drag-and-drop while retaining some key concepts that bridge the gap into more powerful languages(conditional branches, named variables, and list manipulation)