I've actually thought for quite some time that programing might be taught best via shell scripting.

By starting off by learning shell, you'd get all the basics like iterators, functions, variables, etc... You can then extend the newbies knowledge with stuff like regular expressions, pipes (parameter passing) etc.. At the same time, however, you'd be teaching a new programmer an incredibly useful set of tools that they can build on.

It took me 3 semesters of Java before I could code non-trivial programs. In one semester of Unix shell scripting, I wrote a flat file database with a decent user interface. I learned more about programming in that one semester than I did in 3 semesters of Java.