My recipe for the best possible syllabus for CS 103: * Turing machine -- just the tape and making it do the equivalent of procedures so that we can compose th

My recipe for the best possible syllabus for CS 103: * Turing machine -- just the tape and making it do the equivalent of procedures so that we can compose things. Brainfuck is a valid homework medium. * A relevant ISA such as ARM -- We can let Thumb/2 be bonus points, but the real goal is just to convey that ISA's are usually written to take the most generally abstractable things you would do with a Turing machine and do it more succinctly and faster in hardware. * Build a function stack with the goal of understanding how procedures become generalized by calling conventions or optimized by inlining. The lesson is that we stay pure for flexibility and get dirty for raw speed. * Introduce Scheme and tail recursion optimization. Now the whole of functional programming and the abstractions -- and their optimizations -- are opened up with a firm footing in the machine. Turing and Church probably did write most of CS, so it's obvious that you want to relate the two to create the most generally useful bridge concepts for the rest of the long life of a programmer, that if they never let up, will inevitably touch both high-level and low-level languages. OS's are the final frontier here, but cannot possibly be squeezed down due to things like MMU functionality totally clouding up what is what. Making a machine look like it belongs to the program is what OS's are good at, and this is a different kind of abstraction to grok than the relationship between the machine and the programmer.