I'm quite similar. But I'm not sure a good CS curriculum has to be like that. One of the neat things about most applied CS is that you can teach it hands on, w

I'm quite similar. But I'm not sure a good CS curriculum has to be like that. One of the neat things about most applied CS is that you can teach it hands on, with minimal equipment. Even more, you can teach it using "toy" or "educational" examples—Minix instead of a "real" OS; algorithms in Lisp or Haskell instead of Java and JS. I went to one of those universities that taught all the freshmen classes in an obscure language, and that bounced between different languages and platforms throughout the curriculum. While plenty of students complained about not learning immediately marketable skills, I thought this was great--it cut down to size the kids who thought they knew it all because they could get by with common tools; it abstracted the problem space a bit to be more of an exemplar (but, to your point, an applied example); and it stressed the importance of knowing _how_ to think, not just how to use one particular tool.