I don’t necessarily feel the need to ban loops and variables, but I do kind of wish schools didn’t start with object-oriented languages. My undergraduate program started with Scheme but I actually think a proper procedural language would be a fine choice too.

(Or even - and I know this is a spicy take - assembly language. An intro-level course that takes students through games like TIS-100 and Human Resource Machine might have a lot of pedagogical value.)

What I’ve observed is that people who have had to spend some time working in a language that maintains a clean separation between functions and data tend to be better at domain modeling, which ultimately enables the to produce designs that are simpler and easier to maintain. OOP can be a powerful mechanism, but it seems like, perhaps ironically, people who only know OOP tend to have a harder time reasoning about information flow, control flow and state. Perhaps because object-oriented language features are mostly meant as a way to abstract over those concerns. Which does have some value, but maybe also discourages learners from thinking about them too deeply.