I have painful memories of my second-semester undergraduate "data structures and algorithms" class. Lots of difficult C++ programming projects; constant seg fau

I have painful memories of my second-semester undergraduate "data structures and algorithms" class. Lots of difficult C++ programming projects; constant seg faults. I didn't have any conceptual difficulties with pointers or pointer arithmetic. Rather, my difficulties were with the unforgivingness of the language: you had to be very anal-retentive and cautious, and I found it to be a slog. And when something went wrong -- which it inevitably and repeatedly did -- the error message would give you no context, no clue as to how to proceed. Just a bare "Segmentation fault". There is value in this to be sure, but I didn't find it easy, nor did I enjoy it. > Math education is getting dumbed down and the abstractions are increasing. I am a math professor, and I find these statements contradictory. High-level math is largely about being able to understand and manipulate abstractions. Indeed, a lot of these abstractions are upstream of computation: understand the theory, and you can predict in advance how your computations will turn out.