The language for my intro CS course in college was APL, a language designed with the idea "let's make a huge number of things one-character operators, even if we have to make up new characters and have special terminals and keyboards that include them." It was great for that "initiation into the temple" feeling of learning ways of thinking that are different from those of ordinary mortals, but if I hadn't already studied procedural languages beforehand, I might have been warped for life. :-)
I'm all for exposing students to different ways of doing things (languages, user interfaces, everything), so they don't get stuck with the idea that everything has to be like the most popular, but on the other hand, I've never really understood the Cult of Lisp. (I used Lisp for at least a couple of classes, and occasional Emacs-hacking.)
Intro languages
I'm all for exposing students to different ways of doing things (languages, user interfaces, everything), so they don't get stuck with the idea that everything has to be like the most popular, but on the other hand, I've never really understood the Cult of Lisp. (I used Lisp for at least a couple of classes, and occasional Emacs-hacking.)