I started out with Common Lisp and David S. Touretzky's book[1]. The great thing with Lisp or Scheme as a first language is that it requires learning very few c

I started out with Common Lisp and David S. Touretzky's book[1]. The great thing with Lisp or Scheme as a first language is that it requires learning very few concepts and very little little syntax to get started. Lisp isn't terribly functional, but the functional style feels natural to use. I like the idea of starting with pure functional programming. With procedural programming you have to teach two concepts, functions and side-effects. With pure functional you only have to teach one of those concepts. That is until you need to interact with the world, ideally you'd start out with a framework that papers over all of this. Maybe Elm would be good option for this reason? It helps that you can easily produce something graphical that can be interacted with from the very beginning, and building web apps is probably the most common application for programming these days. 1. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf