Lambda the Ultimate

Well, have to disagree on the last point really as I was faced with Logo and K&R as a child.

Nothing proved more valuable or exciting than the latter in all machine abstraction work, same applies to more mature, later Smalltalk variants etc etc.. Heck, I believe children are capable and closer to the idea of doing basic assembly and arithmetic than Lisp-ish ideas. And no it isn't a good idea to talk to them of modern prefetch etc facilities of CPUs, so scrap that for a moment.

And in a way, I believe kids have to make messy code mistakes early.
(put simply: it is important for them to enjoy it and Logo was, is and always will be underwhelming under an onslaught of games, 'demo' scenes on new ideas, tech and competition between kids; plus there's a web in the mix and should be closer to them than today's grandmas-and-grandmasters of VAX).

Lisp always seemed to be for grown ups of 30 something, moving into data and structure of code after being sick of repeating yourself (something this industry does fairly well across the big vendor platforms and stacks).

The fact that functional and Lisp code has nowhere near penetrated any decent market share for such a long time and all the attempts to make it 'widespread' in SD community over the years have, well, largely failed.

And not that I'd ever agree Java or C# should be tought as a first language either (that kind of education produces big-headedness rather than creativity and understanding of the abstract models that are far too persuasive to be simply ignored or 'virtualized').

A child can still learn to correct his/her ways through secondary education and move into OO, functional and logic programming pretty early, but not understanding hardware architecture and the underlying environment is a sure fire way to produce another bloated JVM-like framework, GC-assisted simplification to leaking ideas and memory, like MS did and succeeded at lowering the bar to mass-market-C#-VB.NET and frustrating slow and bulky programs.

Best programmers (ie. by widely ack-ed quality of code) I've ever seen (that is in C++, on VMs or Lisp and ML) have reverse engineering, hardware tinkering, and very early software experimental background as children (you know on old, and first personal PCs).

This is almost 1 year old thread, but as this page is still highly referenced via google it should be noted that ACM has removed free access for these books.