Comment by bunderbunder

The danger in demanding to just be taught how to be a good code monkey is that that increases your risk of getting stuck just being used as a code monkey.

My intro CS class was taught in Scheme. I haven't found what I learned in that class to be quixotic at all. Instead, I view it as setting me up with a strong foundation that colleagues of mine who learned in a more "popular" language lack. It's put me at a permanent advantage for designing and building software - even decades later, I find that there are ways of decomposing problems that I can understand easily, and colleagues of mine who learned on Java still have trouble with, because they simply lack the "design vocabulary" that would enable them to think about the problem in the right way.

We never again used the language past that first introductory course, but I still don't think it was a waste of time, because it allowed us to cover so much ground so quickly. In 3 months we went from basic fundamentals to building our own object-oriented programming system from scratch. That's amazingly powerful. A deep knowledge of what object-oriented programming actually is, and how it works under the hood, is usually considered an advanced and esoteric concept that few people really understand. Fast forward about 15 years, and having that kind of knowledge in my head allowed me to take a job at a Java shop, having never touched the language previously, and then within just a few short months have a deeper understanding of how Java works than colleagues of mine who had been using it on a daily basis for 20 years. So that they were coming to me for help with Java problems, despite having an order of magnitude more experience with the language.

Rewind back to school, and it's the same story. The second class in the freshman curriculum used C++. It was not a course in C++, mind - it was a class on algorithms and data structures. Learning C++ was just the first couple of weeks. And learning it mostly consisted of being taught the syntax and the build and debugging tools. The semantics for everything - pointers, classes, templates, etc. - took a negligible amount of time because it could be explained to us in terms of concepts we had already learned by building ourselves - in a 3 month intro class.