Comment by bjourne

> The program design skills that our current curriculum emphasizes are “what distinguishes a garage programmer from a serious software developer,” in the words of the Fundies 1 textbook.

I lol:ed.

> The “code swap” at the end of the semester, where students are required to build upon other students’ code, is one of the assignments students struggle most with

Wow, sadism may be common in academia, but that is just on a whole different level! A few hours of waterboarding would be nicer.

There is exactly zero evidence indicating that Racket would be a better introductory language than Python, so why not go with what is popular? CS students are de facto expected to already know basic programming. So with Python you can jump straight to algorithms, you don't have to waste time with a foreign syntax and an esoteric interpreter.