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Depends on how young. Logo if they're in elementary school; it was designed for children of that age. A large number the students I teach started with Logo as children and went on to learn other languages.

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I think Logo gets a undeserved reputation as a "kindergarden" programming language, when it's actually a nice Lisp dialect. See Brian Harvey's "Computer Science, Logo Style". Available for free for personal use (as in free beer) at:

1. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html

2. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v2-toc2.html

3. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v3-toc2.html

(edited for better display of list of links)

While what you say is true about Logo being a good lisp, I would say the reputation it has is not undeserved but instead intentional due to the target audience of the turtle graphics system. The lisp-ness is incidental — I wouldn’t try teaching kindergarteners Clojure.

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