To me there seems to be something wrong with using as the first language something that depends on a very, very complicated runtime and execution model to run on the hardware we currently are using. This way people end up viewing programming languages as some God-given black box and not just something another computer program written by another person provides for you.
I think CS students should instead start by learning basics of computer architecture at a high level and programming on a level close to the computer architecture that so far has turned out to be practical, the Von Neumann machine. This way they can understand the whole field better, if you never face the challenges of organizing computations in a computer without many existing layers of abstractions designed by other people, you will never understand the development of the field and how the disciplines of algorithms, operating systems, computer architecture, etc came to be the way they are, too many things are taken for granted by people who have only seen very high level languages.
People should know what the stack is, how function calls works, what is an assembler, what linked lists, binary trees, hash maps, ... are and why those had to be invented etc. I think something at the level of Go or C is best for that. Then I think a good moment comes for a course like SICP where people can learn how to take those pieces and build abstraction layers out of them.
I think CS students should instead start by learning basics of computer architecture at a high level and programming on a level close to the computer architecture that so far has turned out to be practical, the Von Neumann machine. This way they can understand the whole field better, if you never face the challenges of organizing computations in a computer without many existing layers of abstractions designed by other people, you will never understand the development of the field and how the disciplines of algorithms, operating systems, computer architecture, etc came to be the way they are, too many things are taken for granted by people who have only seen very high level languages.
People should know what the stack is, how function calls works, what is an assembler, what linked lists, binary trees, hash maps, ... are and why those had to be invented etc. I think something at the level of Go or C is best for that. Then I think a good moment comes for a course like SICP where people can learn how to take those pieces and build abstraction layers out of them.