It's sort of inescapable, because there's some baseline level of tooling that needs to be supplied to the students to that they can learn the actual subject mat

It's sort of inescapable, because there's some baseline level of tooling that needs to be supplied to the students to that they can learn the actual subject matter of the course. As a practical example, in my graduate program, there were some courses where the professors handled a lot of those baseline details, and courses where the professors gave a lot of leeway to the students. My observation was that the latter courses couldn't go nearly as deep into the official topic of the course. Students would spend so much time managing their programming environments that it became a serious distraction. Also, in reference to your question, "Isn't the language just a tool?" - no, it isn't just a tool. It's also a language. For a professional software engineer, the programming language isn't just a way of telling a computer what to do; it's also the primary, and most authoritative, medium by which you communicate complex technical information to your colleagues. It's perhaps comparable to the divide between informal language and legal language - one is useful, especially for communicating to people with limited expertise in the field, but the other is where the rubber actually meets the road.