[eggdaft]

I agree. I was taught Scheme and I later taught it. It was a much cleaner and suitable language for teaching computer science than Python. Students could completely understand the language and how it worked by the end of a semester.

Scheme is much closer to mathematics, which made it much more suitable for teaching strong mathematicians arriving without coding experience. It also made the hackers more rigorous and broadened their minds from the imperative "do this then that" mindset.

There's a notable difference between those first taught scheme and those first taught Python. Of course, both can go on to learning Python or FP or whatever. But that foundation needs to be there to teach truly great coding for most mortals.