Comment by bunderbunder

There is at least something to be said for having spent a semester starting with a bare-bones but malleable language like Scheme, and then building up your own libraries to implement more advanced features like object-oriented programming and list comprehensions.

Because then you’re interacting with these things in a really concrete way rather than just talking abstractly about what’s going on inside the black box. And I’m fairly well convinced at this point that mechanisms like virtual method tables and single dispatch functions are the kind of thing where an hour or two just making one yourself will go a lot farther than many days’ worth of lectures. Perhaps even many years’ worth of hands-on experience.