[kccqzy]

Agreed! Version control is not a natural concept that a beginning student would immediately think of. It’s also helping that a beginning student’s programming assignments are typically simple and short enough that doing without VC is tolerable.

[ams6110]

They are also typically working alone (or are suppsoed to be!) in the early classes. Team projects tend to come later.

If you're working by yourself on the sorts of programs that are in introductory classes, you don't loose a lot without VC and it greatly simplifies things and lets students focus on the actual exercises/assignments.

Git would be horrendous overkill for a freshman programming class and it has so many footgun possibilities that the TAs would be going nuts helping students recover from various disasters.