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I definitely agree, with a caveat: I would say that (Common) Lisp is the best language to learn computer science. If I had only an hour to teach a young child some fundamental CS concepts, I would make sure to include the concept of recursion. Common Lisp makes this, as well as a few other CS 'building blocks', trivially easy.

(The reason I'm distinguishing between programming and CS here is that 'programming' is a broad term that encompasses a number of use cases. If someone wants to learn 'programming' to throw together a few simple webapps or do some text processing, Lisp will get the job done, but they probably won't care too much about learning these fundamentals).



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