.
I completely agree, I've dabbled in Lisp and Prolog. My point is
that most languages are based around: variables, conditionals,
loops, and procedures. There are variations of implementing this,
and many additional concepts floating around, but the concepts I
listed appear as the base of most languages. I thought it might be
better to hold off from introducing predicate calculus and list
based coding for a first time programmer. ;-)