Why did we ever think the first programming language didn't matter?

Not sure about 'useful', but the first language taught in my college CS courses was Turbo Pascal. A bit OO, but also had pointers, etc... I guess it was fine.

TBF though, where I went to school, after the first two classes students were expected to pick up the 'class language' for all future classes. This meant C in compiler and OS class, Java in data structures, Python and Lisp in some other classes. We were learning CS topics, and the given language was just a tool that could change depending on which teacher taught the class that semester.

By the mention of Turbo Pascal above you can probably guess this was a long time ago. I'm sure schools have changed since then.

Java makes me want to break something too.

Like most kids in my generation (learning to program in the early 1980s) BASIC was my "first language", but it wasn't until I learned C at college in the late 80s that I really started to feel capable. I rarely use C for work anymore but I still "think in C" when trying to work out any sort of low-level algorithm no matter what language I wind up implementing it in (nowadays mostly Python and JavaScript).

What I like about C is that it can teach people the fundamentals of programming without imposing a lot of implicit structure on learners.

A lot of courses start with Java and I think that makes it really hard for students later to untangle the concepts of programming from the OO ones Java imposes on people.

This reminds me of Northeastern's CS undergrad curriculum. First semester we learned Racket (a basic functional Lisp language). Then second semester we learned Java, but in a strange functional way (kind of like writing Java "as if" it was Racket, often using one-line functions and recursion). Afterwards you learn more traditional Object-Oriented development and algorithms, then branch off into (optional) web-dev, distributed systems, embedded systems, ML, etc. or go back into higher-level functional / OOD-style classes.

At least from my understanding, this doesn't seem to affect students when they gradate, e.g. they aren't programming any different then any other college. Although, Northeastern grads are supposedly known for being good developers. Maybe that's just the rigorousness of the curriculum itself.

For people who aims to become professional software engineers, sure. But you can't expect other professionals to learn more than one language though, learning one is more than enough work.

Lisp is arguably not much more functional than javascript; is JS a gateway to ML/Haskell?

I suspect that isn't true. I've met lots of people working in functional languages who didn't start there, including myself.

> It’s rare to find a functional programmer.

FTFY

My (crusty old) experience is that folks who did CS in college at schools that were more theory-driven tend to have experience with functional coding. I don't recall being taught Lisp but I do remember having to just figure it out for class. Because the class wasn't about teaching a language and there was homework in Lisp.

I've seen a lot of professional programmers pick up Clojure from varied backgrounds and come to write idiomatic functional Clojure. I don't actually know many people who use Clojure daily whose first language was a Lisp or an ML, everyone seems to learn Javascript, Python, or Java. Some of the older programmers learned assembler or C/C++ first.

Clojure really encourages data-oriented programming, similar to what you often find in Python codebases. Mutation isn't the default in clojure for common data structures, so writing your iterative code is just more work than writing functional code using the immutable defaults. Language design has a big impact here. That's not to say you can't write imperative mutation heavy code in Clojure, but you're either going to fight the language or build up your own utility libraries to do it. It's there, but it's rarely idiomatic and often seen as a performance tradeoff.