Comment by dtartarotti
6 hours ago
Grinnell College's (my alma mater) CS program first intro course is entirely in Racket. The program basically has three sequential intro courses: functional programming with Racket, imperative programming with C, and OOP with Java.
I wonder whether it's easier at small liberal arts colleges – my alma mater has a second-semester course teaching SML, Go, and PDP-11 assembler.
The issue is that "CS 110" gets used by a lot of STEM students in other departments that require computational methods and statistical tools, and that require you get to a CS course taught by actual computer scientists. I don't necessarily think that it's a bad thing that you'll need CS 101 before a higher-level biology elective that needs R!
Grinnell 17' here. At first I didn't enjoy intro with Racket. But by the end I changed my mind and it ended up being one of my favorite courses. In retrospect that class easily had the most impact on me during my CS major... I still have quite a few functional programming habits. These days I like to code in elixir for side projects, which has quite a few similarities.
Anyways, cool to see another alum here! I hope the department keeps it around for a while longer :)