I agree. I was taught Scheme and I later taught it. It was a much cleaner and suitable language for teaching computer science than Python. Students could completely understand the language and how it worked by the end of a semester.
Scheme is much closer to mathematics, which made it much more suitable for teaching strong mathematicians arriving without coding experience. It also made the hackers more rigorous and broadened their minds from the imperative "do this then that" mindset.
There's a notable difference between those first taught scheme and those first taught Python. Of course, both can go on to learning Python or FP or whatever. But that foundation needs to be there to teach truly great coding for most mortals.
I only use print debugging when working on the web, and your mention of console.log makes me think maybe you're in the same boat.
It's an absolutely damning indictment of the developer experience for the web that this is the case. Why aren't our IDEs and browsers beautifully integrated like every other development environment I use integrates the runtime and the IDE?
Why hasn't some startup, somewhere, fixed this and the rest of the web dev hellscape? I don't know.
I’ve applied a few times, considering stopping applying.
What I’m more concerned about is (a) everyone seems to be incredibly young, I’m not, and (b) being a solo founder means you’re almost certain not to be accepted.
Scheme is much closer to mathematics, which made it much more suitable for teaching strong mathematicians arriving without coding experience. It also made the hackers more rigorous and broadened their minds from the imperative "do this then that" mindset.
There's a notable difference between those first taught scheme and those first taught Python. Of course, both can go on to learning Python or FP or whatever. But that foundation needs to be there to teach truly great coding for most mortals.