This is why I like that Northeastern does their intro class in a Racket / Scheme dialect. (plug for https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ as IMO the best way to l

This is why I like that Northeastern does their intro class in a Racket / Scheme dialect. (plug for https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ as IMO the best way to learn computer science) The goal is to learn how to think about problem solving and program design, not simply to make the computer do what you want. I found that (myself included) people who came in with experience in imperative languages, etc. had a harder time than people who came in fresh. But the takeaways around functional programming, data structure design, testing, etc are far more important for a career than the ability to make some arbitrary program do some arbitrary thing.