I need something I can easily instruct them on how to install, and has good cross-platform support so that a basic programming lesson will work on whatever OS the attendees are running. Remember they are non-technical so may need more guidance on installation, so it should be something that is easy to explain.

Honestly, as much as I personally despise it as a language and as much as you probably shouldn’t use it for large applications, JavaScript.

If ease of setup and platform compatibility are your absolute top priorities, nothing beats it. Every mainstream OS runs JavaScript, and it’s already pre-installed in the form of a web browser. On any desktop system (and even mobile systems with some effort) you can use any text editor to write an HTML file with inline JavaScript and run it by just clicking it.

Python, the next best option IMO, still requires knowledge of how to use the command line, and on Windows, requires installation that is slightly more involved than installing a regular program (adding it to your PATH, etc). Python for beginners are also limited mostly to console apps, and making a GUI is much more difficult especially for new programmers. Again, you’d first have to teach them what a console even is and how it’s actually still used by developers and is not a relic of the DOS days (something I’ve noticed non technical people tend to assume, they think GUIs made consoles obsolete). JS on the other hand is literally made to create GUIs on the web, meaning they will be able to create the kinds of software they’re already used to interacting with, which is both easier for them to wrap their minds around and also more enticing. Someone with no technical experience might wrongly assume that a text only interface is like “training wheels” and what they’re learning doesn’t apply to “real” software.

More importantly, they will be able to show off what they built to their friends, without needing them to install anything or send source code or executables which can get blocked by social media filters. Services like Netlify will host your static pages for free, making sharing their work as simple as posting a link. Having a GUI is even more important in this regard, so they don’t have to walk their friends through how to use a console app when they barely understand it themselves.

JS in the browser also has the benefit of being in a sandbox, meaning they can’t easily interact with other parts of their computer like files or system configurations. This may seem like a disadvantage but for someone just learning what programming is, it’s reassuring that they can’t accidentally kill their OS or delete their files.

However, keep in mind that JS is pretty infamous for teaching bad habits that will have to be un-learned when switching to other programming languages (and so does Python TBH, though to a much lesser extent). It really depends on what kind of developers you want them to be by the end of this. For people just looking to casually make some interesting software they can show off to their friends, JS is probably the easiest way to do it. If this is meant to be the start of a path toward becoming actual professional developers, Yogthos’s suggestion of Clojure or Scheme is probably better because those languages will teach much more rigorous programming and software design practices from day one.

Since you said non-technical I definitely recommend Python. It is easy to install and easy to get going with. It is feature ful. It is generous. You can do really interesting things without sweating details like pointers and segfaults.

If this was a technically minded crowd, especially students like in high school and in person, I would have said C

I’d be surprised if MS Windows came with a C compiler, tbh. But it’d be a bad choice for non-technical people anyway; it’s not exactly a user-friendly language…

Python would’ve been my choice, but maybe also consider Lua (a lot of games include it as their scripting language, which might be an easy selling point for people)

I would suggest taking a look at Scheme or Clojure for somebody who has no development experience. The big reasons being that these are high level languages so you can focus on learning the actual concepts without all the incidental complexity of imperative languages. Scheme in particular was designed as a teaching language. The other aspect is interactivity, Lisps have a tight integration between the editor and the REPL and you can evaluate functions as you write them. This is incredibly helpful for learning as you can write a function, send it for evaluation, and see the result immediately. So you can play with code and get an intuition for how things work.

I’m also going to lean on javascript. It’s practical and if the student produces something interesting, it’s rather trivial to distribute (with minimal risk from sharing).

There are various web-based tools as well, or going old school with locally edited files, the browser is also your debugger.

Creating visual content is easy and there’s multiple options for output that don’t rely on extra code for a full app.

Javascript also has that C-like syntax if you want curly braces and the like.

Python, definitely.

It’s easy. Succinct. You can use any text editor. Has a huge community. Huge library.

Python.

• It’s pretty easy to get going.
• the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
• you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
• it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
• the standard library is very good.

You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.

Ada programming language. Check alire

If there’s no specific use-case (this is a general introduction, not Intro to Operating System Design) and this isn’t academic Computer Science teaching, then certainly a scripting language.

Easy to learn, easy to use, and much more applicable for simple automation that benefits the people learning.

C is dangerous if someone doesn’t take care. Java is verbose and personally I didn’t enjoy it one bit. You said this is a non-technical crowd and you expect them to follow at home.

Absolutely do not use Python. It’s a nightmare to install on random computers and the majority of your time spent will be trying to get it working on everyone’s computer (that was my job at one point). As far as I remember, there isn’t a “good” C compiler that comes on windows and the one on Mac is missing some stuff.

I’d go with Ruby, it’s dead simple to install on every OS, easy to teach and learn, and doesn’t work differently across OSes. There’s an installer for it for windows and it comes installed by default on Mac (or it did? Maybe they stopped that).