The authors of How to Design Programs use Lisp (well, Racket/Scheme) and they are some of the most careful and thoughtful CS educators, who are appear to be thi

The authors of How to Design Programs use Lisp (well, Racket/Scheme) and they are some of the most careful and thoughtful CS educators, who are appear to be thinking deeply about CS pedagogy (at least, this is the impression I get from reading some of their papers and some of HtDP). So I wouldn't be so quick to write off Lisp as an intro language over Java. "I studied both Java and Haskell at University and found it much easier to get going with Java than with Haskell (I hacked lots of QBasic - I am getting on a bit - when I was a kid)." I think Java is arguably closer to Basic than it is to Haskell, so this isn't really a very fair or representative data point. (I don't claim that non-programming undergrads taking CS 101 would be more successful if started with Haskell instead of Java, although I believe that's not unheard of).