My guess is that a lot of people who are getting an introduction to programming don't know what their future ambitions for programming are. "Oh, you want to lea

My guess is that a lot of people who are getting an introduction to programming don't know what their future ambitions for programming are. "Oh, you want to learn the basics of programming, do you? Well okay, we have some different offerings; do you plan on programming micro controllers embedded in amphibious robots? Maybe you want to write an SMT solver? Or maybe writing software for caching HTTP responses for web servers is more in line with your ambitions..." You might as well start with the stuff that is common to most of (contemporary) programming.