I recently responded to someone's blog comment that said that BASIC is not a good language for beginning programmers. He suggested instead that beginners learn C. I responded that C is a fine language for many purposes (like operating system development), but that it contains too many difficulties that are not fundamentally related to learning programming. Here's a cool page that I found using StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com that illustrates my point effectively. ;-)
http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/topten.html