I agree with your sentiment, however, I'd like to pick an nit:
"I see a lot of parallels to this with teaching high school students C. We're going to teach them a nearly-40-year-old language (might as well be from the 1500s)"
The age of the language isn't so much the issue; Lisp is quite a few years older than C and ML came on the scene the same year C did. I think Smalltalk is just about as old as C. Yet teaching Lisp or Smalltalk (using Squeak) would be a much better idea than teaching C as a first language.
Teaching C as a first language would be akin to having only stick-shift cars in Driver's Ed. Now, I happen to think it's important to learn to drive a stick, but first you start the kiddies off with automatics so they get used to other, more important aspects of driving and then towards the end you teach them how to drive a stick.
"I see a lot of parallels to this with teaching high school students C. We're going to teach them a nearly-40-year-old language (might as well be from the 1500s)"
The age of the language isn't so much the issue; Lisp is quite a few years older than C and ML came on the scene the same year C did. I think Smalltalk is just about as old as C. Yet teaching Lisp or Smalltalk (using Squeak) would be a much better idea than teaching C as a first language.
Teaching C as a first language would be akin to having only stick-shift cars in Driver's Ed. Now, I happen to think it's important to learn to drive a stick, but first you start the kiddies off with automatics so they get used to other, more important aspects of driving and then towards the end you teach them how to drive a stick.