Well, that settles that. I wasn't necessarily planning on programming by numbers, but I wanted to gather thoughts on doing so. Fortunately, I've been working for a long time without line numbers, so I'll be just fine there.

As for a language that should be used for beginning programmers...as said above, BASIC isn't bad, but it isn't good, either. Perhaps Java would be a good way to start out. The school I attended has since dropped BASIC and gone to C, which I think is a mistake (due to complexity).

You never know what you'll learn from asking a question like this :)