Or for younger programmers (pre-college) a learning oriented language like Processing where you can gently move into java, and get to do graphical and interactive programming quickly seems to be a better option. As a teen, the lack a excitement from learning to write to files and handle text input killed my initial enthusiasm for programming and had me go first into the sciences instead. Whereas, I still find it very satisfying to be able to make interactive graphics in a few lines of code in a way that text output or static webpages never will for me.

For the college level, I agree with the writer's suggestion of Python, not just for its ease of learning, but its breadth of libraries making it useful for many science and engineering courses. However, I think that for getting advanced (fun) features early on by picking and getting the right library (working) may still be a bit too much unnecessary friction to do 'fun' programming to get earlier students engaged. Learning extra tooling and library systems is 'trivial' if you code regularly, but is still a surprising amount of work when you're new to programing and gets in the way of early feedback. (I have had colleagues in the sciences hesitate at the sight of import statements, dealing with multiple libraries, and new IDE's when suggesting using something like sci-py/python over Matlab for projects, for these sorts of reasons.)