[OkayPhysicist]

I think that "stumping" characteristic is really important in intro-level CS courses. My university actually had two choices for CS100: JS or Racket, and as a TA I saw the Racket class as significantly more successful at setting students up for success.

Most students come in with some programming experience. A handful come in with a lot, the rest have none. The latter two groups fared about equivalently when compared with their counterparts in the other language intro. But the big group of students who had just enough knowledge to be dangerous benefited greatly from the Racket course, and my hypothesis on the subject is that the alienation from what they were used to 1) stopped them from checking out because they thought they knew it all already and 2) forced them to really evaluate their knowledge and separate the language specifics from fundamental truths.

[jaimie]

This was the best feature of Indiana University’s Scheme-based curriculum - it leveled the playing field and caused us to start to think about programming not as engineering, but as a type of mathematics over data.