Hooooo boy, this person is going to make a terrible and incomprehensible intro class full of irrelevant infodumping lol.

basket = []
for pos in billionaires: 
    if pos not in basket: 
-       basket += guillotine(b)
+      basket += guillotine(pos)  # Corrected iterable naming

The distinction here is programming vs computer science. You're correct that it's not strictly necessary, but it really depends on the area of study. Please allow me a small rant about the distinction - this isn't directed at you.

Programming, honestly, could be taught like a trade. It's a skillset and a craft, with best practices and even regulations in some industries. But one doesn't need to know anything about how we got here or the fundamentals that make a computer work electronically, in order to write code.

Computer Science necessarily tracks back through the history of computing, in order to provide a grounding in how all this stuff ticks. You can't talk about Babbage without Ada Lovelace, you can't talk about Alan Turing without what the government did to him, and you can't bring up ARPANET or the internet without talking about Berkley techno-hippies. Every step of the way are people taking capitalist and government interest and subverting it to meet more worldly and socialized goals. Everyone in this story has an agenda and, shocker, the smartest people tend to dominate in this field and reliably don't fuck with conservative nonsense.

Yeah, that comment is just way over the top

in my first semester of compsci we learned about chomsky hierarchy pretty much on day one, while we learned about while loops like a month later.