Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

This applies beyond introductory programming. We faced this in our university's Machine Learning course. The same course was taught both to students from the engineering school, which requires a certain number of math courses (Linear Algebra, Calculus, etc.), and in the general college, which had much fewer requirements.

The professor was forced to stay surface-level on the math, so the coursework was a task of glueing together code from scikit-learn. Unfortunately, the exams were much easier if you had the mathematical intuition.

The cheating came out in the Scheme class, specifically. It was something like 150 students caught. It was not a general cheating scandal in the first CS course over the years. My comment was very clear about this, I did not imply cheating was a problem elsewhere (may have been, I wasn't aware of any issues though).

It wasn't really overblown, it was a problem with that course. The instructors and TAs were grossly unprepared to teach hundreds of freshman a semester in a language they (the instructors and TAs) weren't familiar with that was fundamentally harder (especially for an arbitrary student rather than those actually interested in the topic) than what was done before.

The rest of my comment was about appropriateness of the first course to the students and their objectives. MATLAB being a much better first language for the engineering majors than the general CS requirement provided.

My first not-quite-languages were Logo and then a smattering of autolisp (I didn't learn near enough to know much to do with it). First real programming that followed was Fortran, eventually on a Cray with threading extensions. And then a fork in the road leading to both C and Smalltalk-80 in parallel.

I don't feel like this specific heritage affected how I learned programming. But then, I was mostly self taught with a generous amount of solicited input from older engineers and contractors I worked with/around (looking back, I'm a bit self conscious and just how annoying young me probably was--I did try to load balance at least). So maybe this article doesn't resonate much with me because it comes from the realm of common computer science pedagogy.

In fact, my first "college programming classes" were a year or so later, two classes in C that all mechanical engineering students at BYU had to take. I was able to wow my peers by making a faster sieve of erastones than others. And then for the "chose your own project", I used Smalltalk 80 to model quantities with units and a symbolic algebraic equation modeler/evaluator including a graphic visuallier that could plot arbitrary equations like PV = nRT -- the TA marked off points because my code didn't include enough comments even though the next closest program was a Fortran piece that prompted for a few values and it then spit out the correctly interpolated u, h, or s values from the steam tables. Needless to say, my impression of computer science pedagogy in the early to mid 90s wasn't that great. My take away was not so much what language was first, but who I learned from first.

I learned qbasic, graphing calculator basic, and visual basic more or less on my own. I learned C++ in a mediocre way from the AP course in high school. In university, C++ was the most common language outside of low level architecture courses. I picked up python pretty quickly to make rapid progress on student projects. I pretty much use some combination of C, C++ and python for everything.

I had to use java for a robotics course, and it wasn't too hard to pick up the differences.

I'm going to have to pick up rust in the next few months for work. Reading through the reference manual, it's going to be a bit painful to rewire my brain. So far none of the concepts seem alien, though, just a bit weird.

It’s unfortunate that CS curriculums lean so heavily on math and proofs.