several remarks worth mentioning, as the infoq page seems to be editorialized link bait begging to foment a flamewar. Bob Harper and (his now graduated phd stu

several remarks worth mentioning, as the infoq page seems to be editorialized link bait begging to foment a flamewar. Bob Harper and (his now graduated phd student) Dan Licata are (world class) experts in programming language semantics. What does this mean? They understand in a very very precise sense how difficult it is to correctly understand the exact semantics of various linguistic constructs. Why is this important? Because some of these freshmen will not have had a solid grounding in understanding the most basic of the tools they use, the programming language. These students should come away from their intro class not burdened by confusion over syntax and boilerplate need to use the built in language constructs, but rather a precise enough mental model of the semantics for a basic programming language that they can accurately simulate the execution of their programs with pen and paper, or just in their heads! Yes objects do provide some occasionally fantastic abstraction facilities in certain use cases in practice, but every semantic model for real OO languages is INCREDIBLY complex, let alone considering what is needed for having a correct cost model for operations in an OO language once you consider how many OO abstraction are represented by nontrivial lookup operations / data-structures. What I think is more interesting is the following 1) they've come up with low overhead ways of teaching parallelism constructs directly to intro students and 2) this course is part of a larger system of classes that include their intro imperative programming class being taught by Frank Pfenning (an expert in mechanized theorem proving such as might be used to verify program correctness)that teaches a lot of the basic algorithms / datastructures that are easiest to first see framed imperatively, and 3)they're having the intro algorithms & datastructures course be taught by Guy E. Blelloch, who's done a great amount of good research in a huge number of algorithm topics.