You might also be interested in the work of Dr. Mark Guzdial on the subject of introducing students to programming/computing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI

You might also be interested in the work of Dr. Mark Guzdial on the subject of introducing students to programming/computing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIkRUW6BEBc&list=WLF05B05A865F5765A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIkRUW6BEBc&list=WLF05B05A86...). Now, he argues that language doesn't matter, and that what's important is teaching concepts through engaging applications (more akin to the MIT approach, from what I can tell). Clearly, that approach has had pretty good success (perhaps more so that CM, it's hard to know). However, it does not strike me that these two approaches should of necessity be in conflict. Why can't we use a good functional programming language (like Scheme, ML, or Haskell) to teach useful concepts through interesting applications while still leveraging those mathematical intuitions? I think we can. The idea of using a language with a functional core (e.g. Haskell, Clojure, Erlang, OCaml) has been gaining traction in the industry.