[agumonkey]

I hesitated to say that, but to me the most important part is paradigm and structures/patterns. lisp will teach you untyped tree recursion and metalevel perspective. ml/haskell will teach you typed composition. prolog goal based space exploration. forth stacks. APL arrays. C/Pascal etc are supposed to teach you 'imperative' but I believe imperative is mostly a conflation of lots of things, mutable state.. at best you'll learn state machines.

[ufo]

I agree with you but I think paradigms are more of a "second" language problem than a "first language" problem.

[agumonkey]

You may be right. It's hard for me to really put myself in the shoes of a completely new learner.