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Comment by jbellis | Hacker News Reader

No, it's advocating increasing the number of women in CS by proposing a separate 101 course for people (like, the article assumes, most women) with no prior programming experience, while retaining an "introduction" course for those who do have that. I didn't see any implication that higher-level courses should have separate tracks.

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Indeed, and let's not forget the other half of her point, which was to have introductory level courses focus on solving examples from across science, rather than CS esoterics. From personal experience I agree that if you are trying to get someone interested in a tool, show them what the tool can do before showing them how the tool is made (or how to make their own).

MIT has a class like this as well, 6.00

https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp12/6.00/index.html

    This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. 
    It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation 
    can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of 
    their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small 
    programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the
    Python programming language.

That's because MIT is up-front about expecting their CS freshmen to come in with programming experience.

The implication seems to be that students with no experience can catch up with experienced students in one semester. Or perhaps that the experienced students have an advantage in perspective but not in actual knowledge, and the perspective can be taught in parallel with the knowledge at little cost.

These implications strike me as implausible. I think it would make more sense to create the for-true-beginners course with the expectation that the regular intro course comes after it.

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