What programming language should EE's learn first?

MatLab. Most versatile since it allows for complex analysis, and it's not a far stretch to learn C after.

I'd almost push 'Report Abuse' for that answer.

Matlab is a very powerful mathematics environment, and has some nice options to structurize your code, but it completely fails as a 'good programming language'. No structures are available to understand datatypes, no reasonable options exist to interface to other programs, serial port handling is horribly slow and no way that you're ever going to understand well-structured programming. It's a programmable math-tool, not a programming environment.

I've also used MEX (possibility to use C with Matlab) to connect some DLLs to Matlab, and I fell of my chair when I found out how error -prone and  badly structurized that is (do all type-checking yourselves or you'll get a segmentation fault, have to check the number of arguments you get, and each mex-function needs a separate cpp file). Horrible.

FYI, I voted for C (having an embedded background), and was strongly considering Python (because it's a good way to get something done fast).

I'd almost push 'Report Abuse' for that answer.

Matlab is a very powerful mathematics environment, and has some nice options to structurize your code, but it completely fails as a 'good programming language'. No structures are available to understand datatypes, no reasonable options exist to interface to other programs, serial port handling is horribly slow and no way that you're ever going to understand well-structured programming. It's a programmable math-tool, not a programming environment.

I've also used MEX (possibility to use C with Matlab) to connect some DLLs to Matlab, and I fell of my chair when I found out how error -prone and  badly structurized that is (do all type-checking yourselves or you'll get a segmentation fault, have to check the number of arguments you get, and each mex-function needs a separate cpp file). Horrible.

FYI, I voted for C (having an embedded background), and was strongly considering Python (because it's a good way to get something done fast).

Most, not all, of these answers, in my opinion, assume EE's are all embedded systems programmers. In fact, only a small portion of them are. There are RF Engineers, Power Engineers, Controls Engineers, etc... The purpose of the first programming language is not necessarily to make everyone an embedded systems programmer. It's to give us an introduction to programming and some skill we can use later on, of which the ability to analyze data is a huge one.