Good Starter Language? how about Simula

[David Nicol]

there were some good things said by people who had learned to program
in Simula as
a first language, that I found when i was researching coroutines for
Damian Conway a
few years ago.  Apparently people whose first PL is Simula find later
algol descendents
clumsy.

http://www.item.ntnu.no/~pyse/simula/  appears to be a good
introduction, as is googling
for simula coroutine