I can say that I really appreciate what was done in CS110. I learned about a bunch of topics that would have been taught later on in other curriculums like recursion, graphs, lambda calculus, first class functions, and even implemented minmax. Granted, I took the pilot offering which has since been scaled down (lowest common denominator of student and such) but there were a lot of concepts which just couldn't have been taught efficiently with something like Java, which has a lot more syntax to learn before even being able to get to the meat of the course.

That said, the course is definitely not for everyone. People that taught themselves other languages before coming to UBC generally found it to be too easy at first, wrote the course off as being stupid, then started lagging slowly as time went on and more advanced topics got introduced. I've TAed the course a few times, and have seen that come up a lot. Also, of course, the people that just couldn't grasp the concepts in the course. But overall, it was a fairly well-attended class, with lots of people from across the school (it counted as as a computation course for Arts majors and was easier than Calc 3 :) ). Really cool to see the different ways people would approach a problem.