@edwinb a member of my family recently learned to program in their late 30s. Had interest in computing their whole life and I think had tried some small courses before but it never clicked. Then we tried making a mod for the game Project Zomboid together and pretty soon they were writing lots of Lua. If you ask me to teach a random person to program I will first talk to them to find a project they are interested in making, and then use any programming language which can accomplish their project.