[makmanalp]

OK: opinion time. Some folks in this thread don't understand how pedagogy works.

When these people talk about easy-to-learn, they don't mean what a lot of people in this thread mean. Def / fun is such an easy thing that it's a non-issue. Anyone can learn programming language syntax pretty quickly.

It's the semantics that's hard. When you first start learning, the things that actually trip you up and that you can't just look up in a cheatsheet in two seconds are things like: Unexpected behavior, bad error messages, hidden rules, hidden complexity, complicated control flow, code that doesn't do much but must be there anyway, arcane things that you must do to make the compiler happy.

In that way, you don't have to assume that beginners are stupid. A lot of these things happen because languages are badly designed, or because they evolve to have too much cruft over time in an effort to be general purpose and catch up with the times. For learning, this just gets in the way. With better tools, learners can tackle much more complex concepts much quicker. Once those take place, you can introduce the arcane weirdness of other programming languages, and it makes a lot more sense.