I'd advocate C as the first language. It's small, in that the number of reserved words and the size of the standard library are small, and these days you could teach the use of debugging tools in the same course. Not to mention that it's low level, so you could build on top of those programming 101 courses that teach MIPS assembler as first language.

Also teaches people either to not fear the almighty pointer, or to be continually scared shitless of the big bad segfault.