Comment by mettamage

Skimmed it quickly and saw it taught Racket to teach programming design.

I've worked at a coding bootcamp in 2017. And I have to say, I was a bit jealous. Where I was learning through methods at university that were a bit quaint, my students learned JS with the latest frameworks. And sure, you can argue whether the length of 3 months is enough, but they were surely getting a better education. What they learned in 3 months, took me at least 6 months to a year in terms of how useful it is.

The thing is, especially as a beginner, learning any programming language will give you similar difficulties (glossing over some nuances). So why not just learn a practical one?

I think once a student has had a practical programming course under their belt, only after that should more esoteric languages come to showcase certain concepts. I believe that they'd be more motivated to learn them as they're more into the groove of programming.

And this is coming from someone that has programmed 2 years in Pharo.