I don't think so. I've been using Lisp as long as Paul Graham, but it's not mainstream enough for a first language now. Both Lisp (of some sort) and C are bette

I don't think so. I've been using Lisp as long as Paul Graham, but it's not mainstream enough for a first language now. Both Lisp (of some sort) and C are better used now to extend the foundation, the former in an algorithmic direction and the latter in a computer systems architecture direction. Your first PL teaches you several things at the same time and should probably be fairly simple in all of them, a simplified exposure to lots of things at a higher level, and letting you get right into building some fun things soon--no matter how "thoughtful" you are. Most of the top ten languages now in terms of popularity resemble one another quite a bit, and picking one of those instead of something unusual will make it easier to move quickly into whatever second language is best suited to whatever projects your thoughtful one gets attracted to. And most programming projects these days are less about algorithms than about assembling a system from components, glue code, images, etc.