It depends on what they mean. If it's a physics grad student who wants to learn coding, I assume they need to do high performance work and point them straight to C so they can learn the fundamentals first on memory management, the stack, and so on.

Usually, I ask them what they want to do with code and go from there. Sometimes, I realize that all they really want to learn is HTML and CSS. Other times, I really do feel like the "hardcore" approach would be more fulfilling, albeit slower.