And if you don’t continually use it, you’ll forget it. I used to be considered one of the best 8080 assembler coders and was in the top percentage of DG Nova assembler coders, and these days I barely remember those at all. Not to mention Autocoder, RPG (non-II), and a bunch of other dead languages. When I was teaching CS, I was the instructor people came to when they couldn’t get their program to compile or run properly, since I was passable in a dozen and a half or so languages. I also knew most of the compiler quirks for the various machines in use and could tell the student when it wasn’t their fault.
During the Y2K panic, an old friend of my dad’s (also born in the mid to late '50s) made enough money to retire early. He was a COBOL programmer.
When I started at university (in 1993), Scheme was the language of choice for all of our introductory programming classes. It has a number of advantages as a beginners language - it’s small, simple, and it does a good job of introducing some ideas which might be confusing for the beginner - namely the list data structure and the concept of recursion.
I believe Scheme and Lisp were used quite heavily at the time in the field of AI but I have no idea whether or not that’s still the case.
These days I only really work in C, with a bit of occasional Python for test scripts and the like, so I can’t say I use my Lisp skills much, but for an introduction to the general field of CS, I think it was quite a good introductory language. I’m not sure how much use it would be though if you just wanted to learn programming.