Racket is probably one of the best languages to start with. Incredibly beginner friendly and complete, uniform tooling.
Really? Python relies much more on delimiters than Lisp? Python has all kinds of delimiters for subscripting, comparison, slicing, destructuring, etc. Each one of this adds a lot of syntactic overhead while teaching Python to beginners. Whether indentation makes it easy or more difficult to learn Python is debatable. Indentation definitely makes it easy to read but beginners are learning to write code.
> Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. While "we" consider lisp's parenthesis incredibly useful, new programs find it scary. Forcing it on people does not make it any less scary.
Can you point to some actual data or references instead of making one unfounded claim after another? Do beginners who have not been exposed to any programming language yet really find parentheses scary? Where can I see the data?
I have first hand experience in teaching both BASIC, Python and Lisp (actually, Scheme) to school children as their first programming language. Believe it or not, in my experience they found BASIC the easiest to learn, then Lisp and then Python. For first time learners Python has a lot of pitfalls (screwing up indentation even a little bit leads to errors that confuses students).
Once that is done, it makes more sense to move on to a functional language rather than an eclectic language like Python, which is mostly a collection of features that somewhat work in practice for system administration or scientific one-page scripts.
There is no deeper understanding of CS to be gained from learning Python. To the contrary, it will ruin future programmers.
Dijkstra once said the same of Basic!
Whatever language we teach in schools should be simple and quite natural to get the hang of, and should be somewhat "industry standard" if they choose to continue with said language.
Python is a great candidate because of its reliance on indents and lack of delimeters. While "we" consider lisp's parenthesis incredibly useful, new programs find it scary. Forcing it on people does not make it any less scary.
For me lisp wouldn't be enjoyable without good tooling. Parinfer, paredit, emacs, slynk, etc. make lisp enjoyable to use and edit. Python has the benefit of - you can quickly graphically install it - pip is incredibly easy to use, sometimes to its detriment. - you can edit python sanely in any text editor (even notepad).
Perhaps a lesson in introductory lesson to hy in their compsci python classes would be nice though