I started with Z-80 assembly, then BASIC, then 6502 assembly, then higher-level languages like C and perl, and I think the assembly gave me a useful foundation for what was going on under the hood. I'm not sure I'd even call assembly a "language" in the sense of the others. It has instructions, not statements, and there's really no syntax.

If I were teaching a general-interest programming course, I'd probably start with just a bit of BASIC to introduce a few broad concepts like variables and looping, then a little assembly to say, "And this is what's going on when you do those things," and then move up the chain. Then when they get to something like C and go to look at the assembly it produces for debugging, they'll at least be familiar with concepts like registers and branching. So not quite the order I happened to do it in, but similar.