To be honest, even though I am a Lisp advocate, I don't
necessarily think it's best suited for learning functional
programming, because it is by nature multi-paradigm, and just
as well suited for imperative or OO programing as functional
(and is heavily used in all those ways). I think it's better
to start out with something that is at least "almost" purely
functional, like ML or Haskell. That way one has to
program functionally. Then if one wants to get back to Lisp
later, one will have a good feel for how to use its functional
aspects as well as its imperative and object-oriented ones.
(BTW, people say Lisp now, not LISP. :-)
