[jj8]

It might feel limited for students with prior programming experience. However, my first programming course (in high-school) used BSL & co, taught from “How To Design Prgrams” (1), and it didn’t feel restrictive. Having to manually recurse, construct lists, &c. made clear exactly what later abstractions and syntactic sugar did. Rather than feeling that my hands had been tied before being introduced to, for example, higher order function, I felt I’d been granted superpowers once i had: nearly every function we’d previously struggled to write could now be written in one or two lines, and we even understood fully what those lines meant! Admittedly, this excitement was that of an absolute beginner.

(1) https://docs.racket-lang.org/htdp-langs/index.html