Which language should I be teaching?

[gavcradd]

Hi, I've just been reading through the thread about whether to learn Python or Perl and it got me thinking about something very similar - which language should I be teaching to my VI Form A Level Computing Students?

 

We currently use Visual Basic 6 but it's extremely long in the tooth and every year I think about switching. I always manage to put it off for another year but I think the time has come. The only criteria are :

 

1) It needs to be reasonably simple to pick up - I don't want half the class dropping the course in the first few weeks because they can't get their "hello world" program working. Most of the class will never have done any programming before. Ever.

 

2) It needs to be able to connect to Access databases / text files to store and retrieve data (this is a requirement of the coursework).

 

Other than that, I could choose anything. I *almost* switched to Python last year but was put off at the last minute because I read that variables weren't strictly typed - this would make teaching the theory of data types much more difficult so I got scared and ran back to VB. Pascal / Delphi appeals to me but is it just as out of date as VB? Java and C# just seem too intimidating for the beginner I think?

 

Any ideas?

[pete]

Does it need to connect to Access databases and text files or just one of them?

[tmcd35]

Two questions, is the use of Access databases a requirement of the course or extracting information from a database, such as Access, a requirement?

 

Secondly, what language do you feel most confident and most enjoy programming in? For me the answer is Pascal and I'm sure that can be made to work.