I credit my earlier exposure to BASIC as a very good introduction to programming, because of its bare-bones nature. Too much abstraction would have been overwhelming, to start with - I didn't even understand the purpose of GOSUB for a long while (I knew, mechanically, what it did, but I did not grasp why one would use such a construct instead of just putting all code inline). The simplicity made it an easy outlet for creativity, and pushing the language to its limits and finding the complexity more and more difficult to manage was key to my eventual enlightenment - advanced language constructs felt like gifts, rather than burdens.

Of course this process could be done in an advanced language that grows with the user, but most modern languages are not that - even Python expects the user to understand at least the rudiments of structured flow and objects almost immediately. Lisp (Common or Scheme) isn't it, either - lambda calculus is already far too abstracted from the "series of instructions" model which is a critical foundation for computing in the real world. C, my next step after BASIC, has quite a good balance of available abstraction and a tractable mental model; but the amount of boilerplate (the requirement for main() always seemed baroque to me) and hand holding of the computer (total lack of even trivial type inference) is not ideal for a beginner language.