> Now this is starting to look like Professor of Programming Languages code!

A lot of tier 2/3 CS schools with programming language courses (a survey of multiple languages across various paradigms) teach Prolog this way (and I've seen some fantastically terrible examples of Lisp code coming out of those same courses). It's unfortunate because, at these schools, this is often the only formal course where students branch out of C/Java/C++/C#/Python/JS (and they may only get 2-3 of those over the rest of their courses). It leaves the students with a gross misunderstanding of the languages and dread when they see them again.

If I can solve a problem by building from preexisting LEGO blocks then I'll probably do that, but it wouldn't be a valuable learning exercise. Students aren't being given problems in need of effective solution, these problems are tools to facilitate understanding.

What you described could be pointless if it made you work on reimplementing trivial stuff that you'd already mastered long time ago instead of focusing on actual problem. Writing your 100th hashmap implementation or yet another I2C driver isn't particularly valuable. Since you mentioned "barely passing", I don't think that was the case though.

When I started compsci, it was the first year of a all-new curriculum for CompSci.

Literally the first week: We had to program an Arduino to play a song on a speaker by toggling GPIO, within a week. No assembly or any of that high-level mumbo-jumbo. We had to read the datasheet, look at the instructions and write the hex representation for each instruction in a txt file.

We had a "linker" tool: It took a basic bootloader (containing some helper functions for GPIO), turned our hex-txt file into actual binary, then just copies that to a set address. The bootloader did nothing more than init the GPIO pins and jump into our code.

We were given the locations of where these helper functions lived, nothing else.

It was to give a quick and intimate understanding of how CPUs actually work and why we use compilers and stuff. It worked really well, but it was so much of a pain that they changed it to allow students to use asm a year or two after.

Patterns might appear to the enlighted on the zeroth or first instance, but even the mortal must notice them after several goes. The magic of lisp is that if you notice yourself doing anything more than once you can go ahead and abstract it out.

Not everything needs to be lifted to functional valhalla of course, but not factoring out e.g. map and filter requires (imho) a wilful ignorance of the sort that no teacher should countenance. I think it's bad professional practise, bad pedagogy, and a bad time overall. I will die on this hill.

So I get why a professor wouldn’t jump in with maps and folds. First, you need to make students solve a simple problem, then another. At the third problem, they might start to notice a pattern - that’s when you say gee your right there must be a better way to do this, and introduce maps and folds. The top 10% of the class will have been rolling their eyes the whole time, thinking well duh this is so boring. But most students seem to need their hand held through this whole process. And today, of course, most students are probably just having LLMs do their homework and REALLY learn nothing