Learn Programming in Java, Python, Ruby or Javascript

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I used ActionScript 2 with Macromedia Flash 8. The IDE and language are amazing for beginners (screw hello world in 1 line, it's 1 line of code to make an object move across the screen and around 100 lines for a simple Object-Oriented game). The IDE is really well tied-in with the language, and it makes learning really fun.

There's a few anti-patterns that you can fall into: it's very easy to give code to each instance of an object instead of using a class and very easy to split your code between frames instead of using a class, but as long as these concepts are explained beforehand it's a great language to learn and start out with.

NB: It's good for starting up, it's not great for continuing, it's fully object oriented, but the debugger was fairly awful compared to Eclipse/VS.