[mathking]

As a computer science teacher, I am actually strongly leaning toward "encouraging" our programmers to use Lab View, because it is better at forcing them to design good code. It is fairly easy to take a bright kid with any inclination to write workable code. It is quite another thing to design good code. Lab View's module oriented design, with testing of the modules, promotes good design and good practice. And Lab View is not a fluffy tool. It has been around for a long time and can be used for very intricate, high level programming.

I liken this to a debate that occasionally rages among HS and college computer science teachers: Should students start learning to program by learning assembly? My opinion is absolutely not! It teaches most students bad habits. The counter argument is "Would teach someone to drive a race car without teaching them how the engine actually works?" There are two counters to this argument. The first is simple. Sure you want your race car driver to understand how the engine works. But that is not the first thing you teach them. The second is that assembly is not really "how the engine (your computer) works." It is a less abstract interface than C, but still an abstraction.

I will say that I don't know if my opinion would change if my students did not already know some programming languages. On the whole, I don't think that it matters what language you learn first, as long as you learn good practices and skills. In a general sense (not computer science specific) this is actually an area of pedagogical research that is pretty well studied.