Very much agreed. My main problem with school was being told "how" and not "why". If I were to teach programming, I'd start with straight up assembly. Give peo

Very much agreed. My main problem with school was being told "how" and not "why". If I were to teach programming, I'd start with straight up assembly. Give people a taste of what the cpu is actually doing under all your abstractions. Probably a few weeks, enough for hello world, fibonacci numbers, and an intro to branching. Then introduce C, get used to pointers and basic high-level language concepts. Really hammer in the idea of thinking like the CPU and being mindful of the resources you're using. From there, guide them towards building a real application in imperative C or C++. After that the overarching theme is rewriting the application in an object oriented language, with attention to why and when you should and shouldn't use these new tools. IMO, understanding the fundamentals of how a cpu works is absolutely essential for writing good code at any level of abstraction, and it seems a lot of new programmers are missing that.