I've always been curious about teaching total beginners Lisp. If the adage is true that learning a variety of languages will round you out in the long run, then experimenting with the S-expression, functional-lite model of Lisps as a first exposure should be low or zero-cost.

And then we get to observe: If instead of modeling instructions and memory semantics, we first teach someone to model abstractions and computations, how do they think about programming differently even when eventually exposed to C and its lineage?

Though the pool of students was biased towards those who excelled in high school which post 1980..1990 probably means some prior exposure (i.e., not your "total beginners"), this was a big part of the original idea behind SICP-6.001 at MIT. AFAIK, they gave up on that experiment 15 years ago and moved to Python: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3312

Being faculty / wordy, there is probably much written about it attempting to draw conclusions. There were definitely some "smart, but total beginner programmers" in the mix, although I don't know how scientifically separated the performance of the "two 'some's" might have been.

Relatively recently I found the SICP lecture series on YouTube from the early 80’s. I’d read most of the book already but it was so much better with Sussman and Abelson teaching it.

The audience for the series I’m thinking of is adult professionals- programmers I believe. And I’d heard they were from DEC or HP or some such. So in addition to the material itself, you have the blessed quirkiness of its two authors, alongside a whole lot of late 70s/early 80s attire and rudimentary graphics. Quite a feast… lol.

This is a bit anecdotal, but my freshman high school programming course, in 1999, was taught in Dr Scheme. I had already been programming in Q Basic and C++ at that point, and found it _maddening_. Not because of the perens really, editor was fine, but because of the lack of structured constructs for control flow that I was used to. Tail recursion, while now quite natural to me, just did not make sense at the time. My classmates had less trouble getting that bit because they had no preconceived notion of how control flow worked I think, and also didn’t expect parts of the language to exist that either didn’t or were hidden in the teaching mode we had to use it in. For most of a decade I listed that as my least favorite language of all time, until going back to find out that many of the things that were missing were actually there, they had just been hidden from us, pretty sure by imposing the “beginning student” mode: https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/htdp-langs.html

Simplifying for teaching is good. Making useful things completely unavailable… not sure I agree.