When I started to study programming, one of the languages we used was a dialect of Lisp. It didn't make much sense to me at the time because it only allowed me to do boring things, not cool things. Programming only started to make sense when we switched to C, I did some simple tasks first, then paired off with a classmate and we implemented a simple raytracer for a summer project. Graphics is neat.

So I'm skeptical of the idea that programming education needs to be even more hardcore than Scheme and we need to use a lazy functional language instead. I think the right way to teach programming is to give students a simple procedural language (perhaps not even OO) that makes the computer do cool things, like graphics or webpages. The ones who are curious for more hardcore stuff can always discover it afterward, like I did.