I work at a software company, the only way you're going to be hired as "a developer" there is if you have experience. But, I started out doing customer help desk a couple years ago for $12/hour with no experience and I was promoted from support to QA, to developer, and then to architect. We have two other developers and two QA currently who moved up from support. That probably only works at certain companies though, if you're working at a call center for a huge company it's going to be harder to get noticed. My company is small-ish (50 or so employees), big enough to be able to actually pay salary but small enough that I talk with the CTO every day.

Javascript. I used to enjoy programming.

I first used IntelliJ because I heard it was good for Scala, and didn't like it. I used Eclipse at the time, and I guess it was good enough, so being different than what I knew was enough of a turn-off. I work on a big enterprise Java project now, and IntelliJ has a lot more to offer there (if you shell out the bucks for it). Now that I'm familiar with it, I can't stand using Eclipse.

I use Emacs when I'm just editing text, and I also use the Emacs keybindings in IntelliJ, which is always entertaining when a coworker tries to use it.

FWIW, I always preferred NetBeans to Eclipse for C/C++.

First language was BASIC because it came with the computer and C compilers cost a lot of money. Eventually, I broke down and bought a C compiler, which was the best option for a long time. I write Java and JavaScript at work now. Java is... ok. Out of the languages I can get a job with, it's probably my favorite. Javascript blows and I try to avoid it as much as possible. If I ran the company I'd start writing everything in Scala, but I'd have to write it all myself because nobody else knows it.

Anyway, the reasons I like Scala are that it integrates so well with existing Java code, encourages but doesn't force FP, and has a pretty thorough type system. So, it has most of the advantages of languages like Haskell while maintaining the broad applicability of Java.

Right now I'm interested in learning ATS but it's pretty obscure and probably not all that useful for "real-world" stuff.

I think the most important thing starting out is just to have something with an easy-to-access canvas and i/o so you can get enough visible output to keep it interesting. Not to be selfish but they'd probably notice my disdain for Python no matter how much I tried to hide it so I might rather teach them something I already know and like or at least am interested in learning.

I started out using C, which is probably the worst possible choice, but it still worked.