Having taught BASIC and COBOL to young adults at a trade school and C/C++ and Lisp to adults in a professional development program, my experience is: a. BASIC

Having taught BASIC and COBOL to young adults at a trade school and C/C++ and Lisp to adults in a professional development program, my experience is: a. BASIC is a great language to introduce imperative programming. It's even better if you can teach Dartmouth BASIC, which is more feature-rich than any of the smaller BASICs that came with micros in the late 70s / early 80s. Microsoft BASIC is great if you're processing a sequence of data inputs, which sort of makes sense as this the type of "computing" people had in mind in the late-60s / early-70s. Visual BASIC came along much later and (not surprisingly) had features intended to make larger programs easier to maintain (local variable, named subroutines, etc.) though later versions of Dartmouth BASIC had similar features. We couldn't use it 'cause it was a single-source language and honestly, from a professional perspective, people were MUCH more interested in C/C++ at the time. b. COBOL is great because it forces you to put your data structures up at the top of the program. Peter Naur has a quote "Show me your data structures and I can intuit your functions. Show me your functions and I'll spend all afternoon intuiting your data structures." And there's something to that. So sure... laugh about COBOL all you want, but from a pedagogical perspective, it had several advantages. c. C/C++ benefited from the "I want to learn a language that will lead to a better job" syndrome in the 90s. If you picked up a copy of Dr. Dobbs in 1992, it was all about C++. My personal opinion is C++ is only now starting to be ready for prime time with recent language changes. It's hard to teach. It's hard-ish to learn. It's hard to debug unless you have the specifics of core concepts down (similar to JavaScript). I taught an intro course in C/C++ and counted it a victory if I got students to the point that they understood how stack frames were related to function calls and where static, global and local variables were allocated from. d. I love Lisp because it was effectively my first language. There's a lot to digest with Lisp. It's as hard as C++ to teach, but for different reasons. There area lot of concepts you have to master to get good at it: recursion, macros, what the heck it means to evaluate something, what that single quote thing means. And it's far from obvious why you're doing what you're doing. I think you have to show learners A LOT of idiomatic Lisp code to get them to understand how the code maps over to language concepts. Or at least that's how I did it. Introduce a concept, then some code demonstrating the concept, then some code demonstrating the concept and how it relates to other concepts introduced previously. The thing I like about Lisp is it seems to have fewer, but more powerful high-level abstractions. And I think as an industry we could do a LOT better at tailoring courses on analysis and design for non-OO or non-imperative environments. Anyway... just my $0.02.