[ajdlinux]

It was more faculty politicking than anything else. I'm not too familiar with all the details, but basically - the course was initially proposed as an introduction to "computational thinking" primarily aimed at non-CS majors. Some of the faculty though seemed to want to transform it into the mainline introduction to programming course and potentially replace our existing intro to programming course (which is taught in Haskell).

The current intro to programming lecturer is pretty firmly of the belief that GUI-based languages like Snap which are in many ways quite restrictive just aren't appropriate for teaching CS majors who'll be progressing to C and other languages in their 2nd year. Looks like he's winning the debate at the moment and there aren't any current plans to change his course at least for the next couple of years.