In my opinion, Scheme is not a good first-language to learn for beginners or for anyone getting into programming. Why? Because if you take an introductory CS c

In my opinion, Scheme is not a good first-language to learn for beginners or for anyone getting into programming. Why? Because if you take an introductory CS course taught in Scheme, and you decide the field isn't for you, then you have essentially wasted a semester learning something you'll never use. Compare this to Python, which is general enough to transfer to other domains (with its numerous libraries) and is way easier to pick up. In addition, its near resemblance to English is friendlier to approach. I'm sure there are some plots out there showing the number of companies which use Python versus Scheme. This was the intuition, I believe, of why Berkeley for its 61A course switched from using Scheme as its primary language to using mostly Python and Scheme as a secondary language. (You still learn enough Scheme in the course to be able to build a Python interpreter for it). TL;DR - the language does matter; the first one shapes how one views CS; save Scheme as a later language to be used to shape mental models.