What programming language should EE's learn first?

Oh goodie, language wars!

Personally, I think C and C++ are terrible first programming languages.  C is a great language for writing compact code that maps directly into machine language, but for teaching programming concepts IMO you're much better off with a less compact language that clarifies the concepts you're trying to teach.

I voted for Pascal.  It was designed from the beginning to teach good programming practices like block structuring, declaring variables before using them, and procedure/function calls.  Implementations include bounds checking on arrays so you're less likely to stomp on the wrong memory location, something easy to do in C and hard for a newbie to debug.  Implementations also tend to have better compiler error messages than C.

After Pascal, I think an assembly language should come next.  C is IMO better learned after assembly language, since in many ways C is a portable assembly language that uses high-level notations.  IMO you're going to be a better C programmer if you're familiar with ASM, and you'll be in better shape to debug run-time errors that can only be understood at the ASM level.

Alert readers will notice that I didn't say when to add C++.

I haven't studied Python enough to form an opinion.

JMO/YMMV

Oh goodie, language wars!

Personally, I think C and C++ are terrible first programming languages.  C is a great language for writing compact code that maps directly into machine language, but for teaching programming concepts IMO you're much better off with a less compact language that clarifies the concepts you're trying to teach.

I voted for Pascal.  It was designed from the beginning to teach good programming practices like block structuring, declaring variables before using them, and procedure/function calls.  Implementations include bounds checking on arrays so you're less likely to stomp on the wrong memory location, something easy to do in C and hard for a newbie to debug.  Implementations also tend to have better compiler error messages than C.

After Pascal, I think an assembly language should come next.  C is IMO better learned after assembly language, since in many ways C is a portable assembly language that uses high-level notations.  IMO you're going to be a better C programmer if you're familiar with ASM, and you'll be in better shape to debug run-time errors that can only be understood at the ASM level.

Alert readers will notice that I didn't say when to add C++.

I haven't studied Python enough to form an opinion.

JMO/YMMV

I spent the better part of my undergraduate days learning to code Pascal.

Recursive loops, omg...