> So the course is dealing with (essentially) a strongly bimodal distribution of student ability and the professors don’t want to give the advanced students a f

> So the course is dealing with (essentially) a strongly bimodal distribution of student ability and the professors don’t want to give the advanced students a free ride. That means the course is actually somewhat challenging for all but the most elite programmers and therefore extremely challenging for total beginners. HN readers: universities that teach a so-called "How to Design Programs" curriculum [1] have discovered a partial solution to this problem. Emphasizing a design process in a functional language removes the advantage that students with experience but not a deep understanding gain from knowing how to cobble things together the way they learned in high school AP CS A. I'm not saying it's the only route, but it works well and develops important skills that are (ime) not learned by tinkering. [1]: https://htdp.org https://htdp.org [2]: https://course.ccs.neu.edu/cs2500/labs.html https://course.ccs.neu.edu/cs2500/labs.html