I've been teaching my 11 y.o. son programming with Julia and Project Euler. My personal opinion is that Julia is the best language to introduce to new programmers. First of all, it has very good "IDE" support in various editors with LSP (VS Code being a great newbie choice). It supports a nice mix of language features, mainly imperative constructs, but it also excels as a functional programming language.
I was considering Haskell as a language, but unfortunately Haskell often feels like it gets in the way of your learning sometime. Want to teach for-loops for instance, well you gotta break out Monads.
Python is a popular choice, but I think it's a horrible pedagogical language. I don't want to teach OO concepts, instead I rather have him think about the algorithm and basic computer science principles. The only reason I think people choose Python is that it's super easy to get started, but I think all that simplicity is just a wrapper around a fairly complex runtime. With Julia the abstractions are generic enough that they can stay as abstractions. With Python, I'd feel like I'm just teaching a package (i.e. numpy) and the concept of generic programming would just get ignored.
I was considering Haskell as a language, but unfortunately Haskell often feels like it gets in the way of your learning sometime. Want to teach for-loops for instance, well you gotta break out Monads.
Python is a popular choice, but I think it's a horrible pedagogical language. I don't want to teach OO concepts, instead I rather have him think about the algorithm and basic computer science principles. The only reason I think people choose Python is that it's super easy to get started, but I think all that simplicity is just a wrapper around a fairly complex runtime. With Julia the abstractions are generic enough that they can stay as abstractions. With Python, I'd feel like I'm just teaching a package (i.e. numpy) and the concept of generic programming would just get ignored.