When helping a student (high school) to choose which lanaguge to learn first, a meaningful analogy can and should be drawn between that student choosing his first computer language to learn and his first foreign language to learn. Which language is better for his career is irrelevant he will get to that soon enough. If my son chooses to learn Greek not Spanish I will be enthusiastic. If he wants to learn Turbo or XQuery I will also be enthusiastic. Why, because his enthsusiastic and free choice, not based on pragmatism, but his curiosity and intuition will help him continue down what hopefully be a very enjoyable and exciting journey. With that in mind, when choosing which language to "take" aka learn, what the young student needs is a "course" catalog elucidating the differences (benefits and qualities) between as many of the languages as possible. A resource such as: http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/HelloWorld.shtml or http://home.nvg.org/~sk/lang/lang.html are ideal. And these are only two examples from a quick search on DMOZ under http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Comparison_and_Review/ Therefore, I think by and far the best (most enjoyable and educational for the student) help that a parent can give their child whom is choosing their first language to learn is to give them as descriptive a "catalog" with as many languages as you can find. So they can be excited about the decision they as what will always be (looked back upon many years later) as their first (perhaps of many) language.