[gtycomb]

> At least those who do, want to learn because they can build cool things they can show off to friends.

I have no doubt about what you say. I had a really broken laptop that my 3rd grader happily tookover as his laptop, a linux machine mind you, about which he knew nothing about. I showed him how to open a terminal and use some bash commands, and how to invoke the Python interpreter and import a turtle graphics module. He was hooked and had lots of fun moving the turtle around (along with the incentive to learn some math at his level). I remember the day he walked to school with this duck taped laptop on a show and tell day, which ended up with the school's IT departement making Python available on all computers in that elementary school lab. I don't think he could have pulled this off in lisp. Beautiful language Lisp,but I don't see how I could have helped with graphics programming within an hour or so -- which was all what he was interested in.

[taeric]

Pretty sure Logo was originally implemented with a lisp, no?

Don't fall into the trap thinking lisp is just functional.

[gumby]

Logo basically was Lisp -- a small parser on top of MACLISP.

There were some later small implementations (e.g. for the Apple II) that were written from scratch and didn't need to implement all of Lisp (e.g. lambda, plists, etc).

[flavio81]

>Pretty sure Logo was originally implemented with a lisp, no?

Logo is a bare-bones Lisp disguised as an educational language.

[dTal]

So, someone had lisp, thought "I want to teach people programming", and instead of just teaching lisp directly, chose to implement something quite different in syntax and spirit?