While I think that most CS people should learn assembly and computer internals basics, it would be an absolute disaster to start students off in assembly as CS 101.
Python is a fairly decent language for starting people off:
* It doesn't have a lot of boilerplate, so no magic "I'll teach you what this means in three weeks" steps
* Output for debugging is fairly easy, since print accepts a lot of stuff without needing to muck with formatting strings
* Assignment is a statement, not an expression. You can't say "if x = 3" by accident
* Python is one of the major programming languages, so you're teaching students something that is pretty much guaranteed to be useful for them.
But many students come in with years of programming in a language like Python, Java, or C++. My friends and I built video games when we were in high school so we were comfortable in all three of those languages.
Scheme levels the playing field. I have never encountered a student who entered university with years of functional programming experience and I was a TA for an introductory CS course. I think moving back to Scheme would be a wise choice for universities that are combating problems with diversity.
When you say "programming 101" you might not be talking about the MIT courses being discussed here.
6.001 was a course in functional programming, based on the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
6.01 (the replacement course that uses Python) is a project-based course involving robots and stuff.
Neither of these courses depend on any specific knowledge, but they would be very difficult courses if you've never programmed before. (Most people coming into MIT course 6 have programmed before.)
The "you don't know how to program, here's how to program" course has taken various forms over the years. When I was there it was 1.00, a Java course for engineers. Later it was 6.00, an optional intro to Python, based on "How To Think Like A Computer Scientist".
>6.001 was a course in functional programming, based on the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
While I can't speak for MIT, SICP was used as the introductory course for CS in a number of universities. It assumes no programming. It is challenging, but that's the point of going to top universities.
As part of a reorganization of the undergraduate EECS curriculum last year the intro class is now two half-semester classes, 6.0001 and 6.0002. It's 0's all the way down!
Most campuses call this "challenging" - I did it several times. In city college, I successfully took courses without their prerequisites by speaking with the professors and showing them my work/experience. It wasn't test-based, just portfolio review.
In university, successfully challenging also gives you credits for that course (though there is a small fee per unit). I successfully challenged four courses (all in graphic design) - three of which were based on portfolio review and the fourth was based on completion of course projects in an accelerated period. Additionally, though not quite a challenge, I was able to speak with a couple CS professors and get them into admitting me into their courses despite not having the prerequisites (though was doing them concurrently).
The course requisite structure is more a guideline than a rigid computer system that works one way and only that way.
Berkeley used to let students skip the introductory CS course, 61a (in Scheme), if they had received a 5 on the AP CS exam. They removed that option I believe after fall 2010.
One of my friends was able to skip 61a by meeting with the department chair, Paul Hilfinger, and convincing him that 61a would be a waste of time for him. My friend could drone on and on about the simplest of subjects so we assumed he just annoyed Hilfinger until he said "enough already".
My university did. COS101 was an optional class for complete novices but if you weren't already at least exposed to programming your advisor would sign you up for it. COS125 was the first for-realsies class (taught in Scheme, as it happens).
Today it is not "many" students who come in to college with programming exp; for instance Berkeley's CS61A, which also moved to Python has over 1300 students. The overwhelming majority have not taken CS classes before.
> The overwhelming majority have not taken CS classes before.
When I want to university I never took a CS class before and nevertheless could program really well. I believe one is not able to go to a university if one is not able to teach oneself the prerequirements of the subject that one want to study.
It really depends on the type of school. We started programming on University with a simplified assembly, but it made a lot of sense since it was electrical engineering school and we've learned about hardware in parallel, so we could follow what physically happens when the code is executed. I don't remember that anyone had a huge problems with following it. For many people around me with good math skills, but no previous programming experience (and little interest in it) it was much harder when we next moved to C and data-structures and algorithms, where you need to think in an abstract way and solve more complex problems.
I choose electrical engineering for some weird reason - I don't think it occurred to me that software engineering was a way of making a living even if I had been a hobby programmer since I was 12.
Luckily the introductory course was based on SICP - and it really realigned my BASIC- and C- damaged brain.
It turned out to be the only course that I enjoyed so I eventually switched to a more computer systems and sciences oriented education.
It was a good introductory course for me, and perhaps most others. Perhaps not good for the most daft though...
I guess you also need some assembler-skills but it's hard in a totally different dimension somehow.
I'll add one more item to this list: Python has a turtle graphics library out of the box. Turtle graphics is an excellent way to explain concepts like loops, functions and recursion in a visual way that is much easier to grok than the more abstract explanations. It goes step by step, too: you can show the basic notion of issuing statements by drawing stuff like triangles and squares and pentagons; then demonstrate how this becomes tedious as number of edges grows, which gives an opportunity to introduce looping; then show how it's essentially the same loop for various polygons with different parameters, and introduce functions. Drawing spirals, snowflakes and trees is where recursion steps in. And so on.
Python is a fairly decent language for starting people off:
* It doesn't have a lot of boilerplate, so no magic "I'll teach you what this means in three weeks" steps
* Output for debugging is fairly easy, since print accepts a lot of stuff without needing to muck with formatting strings
* Assignment is a statement, not an expression. You can't say "if x = 3" by accident
* Python is one of the major programming languages, so you're teaching students something that is pretty much guaranteed to be useful for them.