[vector_rotcev]

You have written exactly what I think about this, but more clearly than I could write it down.

Every rebuttal and complaint against this seems to centre around how the moment someone touches an IDE they become a gibbering idiot who is unable to ever learn anything else, as if it is impossible that the next course could be about how the programs they've been writing are all processed and put together by the tool chain.

I once spent a very frustrating and miserable day in the computer labs at university unable to make a program work, and got zero points on that homework, because of a missing bracket. Did I learn anything about programming? Or how computers work? Did the application of anything I'd previously learned about computer science or programming work? No. I learned nothing. I had no time for that, because none of it was relevant. I'd simply missed a bracket very early on in the program, wasn't experienced enough to see it, and that was that.

I did learn something critical though, later on, from a friend: "here, use this NetBeans program and turn on 'syntax highlighting' and check out how it points out 'syntax errors' just like how a word processor highlights spelling mistakes". And from then on I could actually learn programming, and later on that semester we learned about javac and putting stuff together on the command line and big O notation, and all the rest of that good stuff that people have moral panics about not starting with.

It's like everyone's decided to have absolutely zero concept of time, or parallelism, or that students spend more than 15 minutes in their entire life studying before being ejected into the workforce to spam tech debt everywhere. They're taking multiple courses in parallel per semester, followed by more semesters of more courses, followed by more years or more semesters. There's time to learn more than one thing, and space to not have to learn it all in the same place, and a student studying one thing at a time when they're starting from zero is not mutually exclusive with them becoming a skilled programmer who enters the workforce and writes quality code to create useful programs.