Hmmm, that's very much what I gather is the philosophy of of MIT's new "CS1" (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...) which is very different from its groundbreaking 6.001 back in the early '80s. It's gluing together Python libraries to get robots to do difficult things (e.g. differential equations are required, at least in the early version of the course).