I hugely agree with this. I first learned Java in a year long high school class. As soon as the class was over, I knew I liked programming and wanted to become

I hugely agree with this. I first learned Java in a year long high school class. As soon as the class was over, I knew I liked programming and wanted to become a better programmer, but I also had the feeling that there had to be something less painful that Java to program with. This lead me to Python, which I used for everything over the next two years. From Python, I also learned web programming with Django and Flask. Eventually I decided to try to write an IRC bot in Python. During this effort, I realized I knew nothing about networking, concurrency (how does gevent work?), operating systems, and how to do non-trivial IO. Similarly, I also ran into performance and memory problems with some numpy code, and I started to wonder how does this stuff work and why is numpy so much faster than anything I can write in pure Python? These were my "C shaped holes". Around the time I discovered I had these "C shaped holes" is when I started college, which was a good place for me to take low-level programming classes and fill the holes. Besides getting a student motivated, maybe the hard part of education is having students realize that they have these holes.