I would certainly accept a wide range of other languages. I picked Python because I think I and many of my colleagues can teach a good CS1 in Python. I'm open to a lot of other options.
But not Haskell. Please don't say Haskell :)
As I said, I'm partial to lisp. I just suspect that no language is defensible with any real data.
Tons of preferences. But that will be dominated by the dislike most non self motivated learners will have. That is, most students are, I suppose, extrinsically motivated.
Now, tooling would be awesome. But for some reason, the tooling we expose students to is super expensive for personal use. Or requires a lot of investment in time. I'm thinking Mathematica and emacs.
Python is trying with notebooks. But has a lot of ground to catch up on. And seems to breed bad habits in the process.
Depending when you made this argument, stack overflow was a great resource. But many answers for the languages you pick as pragmatic are not good answers for modern use. And it seems to be getting worse.
For the other, you are taking my evidence the other way, oddly. I would expect language to matter very little. Such that, pragmatically, it makes no difference.
That is, I'm not trying to prove people do better because of racket. I'm guessing to prove they do no different because of python. Indeed, I enjoy lisp. But I doubt it is truly easier than most other options. Just so I doubt it is truly harder than most other options.