I think teaching java or c++ to people who are just getting started programming is absolutely stupid. These languages have every possible paradigm crammed in to

I think teaching java or c++ to people who are just getting started programming is absolutely stupid. These languages have every possible paradigm crammed in to them so it's an absolute cognitive overload. Same thing can be said about JavaScript. I would teach rust as a low level language because the compiler forces you to internalize a very specific pattern of thought that is also useful when applied in other languages. Likewise I'd teach clojurescript rather than js for similar reasons and maybe also ReasonML in the future. It'd give students a taste of the different (popular) syntaxes (curly brackets, lisp and ML) and clean minimal mental models. Then when they go work in java or whatever they will benefit from having a clear way of thinking which can be applied in any language (because they'll know to only use 'the good parts'). I see too many people that are intimated or afraid of looking deeper because they were taught basic programming in environments that have grown into some sort of cthulhu. Another thing I'd have on the curriculum is a subject dedicated to learning your text editor (you'd pick an editor and over the semester learn to customize it in various ways, learn about modal keybindings vs. modifier keys etc.).