The entire discussion has so far had no educational perspective. There are only five memes to make educational curriculum decisions. 1) Most arguments for pro

The entire discussion has so far had no educational perspective. There are only five memes to make educational curriculum decisions. 1) Most arguments for programming are from programmers who had fun learning to program and if the purpose of K12 is fun, then all kids should have mandatory enforced fun time which means learning to program. Which will not work for maybe 99% of society, although they will be subject to the curriculum. I had fun playing kickball; the purpose of school is to create an entertaining daycare like environment; therefore all kids should be forced to spend lots of time playing kickball. What about learning, or kids that don't enjoy kickball (or lisp?) 2) We have to prep our 5 year olds by teaching solely vocational skills because nothing will change in programming for the next 12-16 years. I'm old enough to remember "vocational training" that amounted to memorizing ancient versions of already obsolete Excel menus and keystrokes. Utterly useless. We like to think "Clojure K12" would be teaching Clojure, we all know its going to degenerate to drill and kill multiple choice tests about emacs keystrokes. A giant scantron test of multiple guess questions asking what C-X C-C does in emacs or what does M-f do, isn't going to help kids in the real world 30 years later. Better off teaching them welding, industry trends seem to imply TIG is a forever skill? 3) We teach critical thinking skills and frankly kids that can't conceptually understand and solve X+1=2 for X are not going to get anything out of programming that they wouldn't get better out of algebra or geometry. And what do we drop from the curriculum to add Clojure? Sorry kids you're not going to learn Trig? 4) We'll do what the cool kids do. If the cool kids district buys ipads, we need ipads. We had millions invested involving no further reasoning. Is the cool kids district using LISP? No? Well at least a third of districts won't even consider it, then. 5) The school board makes all curriculum decisions and they got and keep their job based on religion and/or politics and LISP isn't hitting the election issue hot buttons quite like a nice argument about creation science in biology class or sex ed or the new stadium for the football team. Industry does not like LISP because is its very expressive and the programmer has the freedom to express any crazy problem solving idea they have in their head. The problem is the human condition of education for the last couple millennia shows its really kinda hard to take a hyper-customized brain dump of ... anything ... from one head into the other. So, it can do anything, any way you'd like, is too much anarchy for any shared work. How this applies to K-12 is if you think grading essays is a PITA imagine trying to grade large LISP projects.