Far, far lower than you're envisioning. There are certainly a lot of freshmen who could easily do something at this level, but the average freshman would be hopelessly lost (at least in my (recent) experience).

By the way, excellent work on Sway. I've been meaning to jump to i3 forever, and decided to move to Wayland on my most recent install. I do have some bug reports to send your way, though, I should get on that.

Thanks! Please do send those along, though a patch is worth a thousand bug reports.

Indeed it is. I'm hoping to get the time to dig into it enough to submit a patch, but school has me pretty busy at the moment.

An average CS freshman knows how to write hello world and print Pascal's triangles on the command line.

An above average freshman at an above average university can probably make Sudoku, Tetris or Brick breaker.

Even the smartest students probably won't be able to make.minecraft in a weekend. Maybe as a semester long project. But not a weekend.

I never suggested anyone could make Minecraft in a weekend. Microsoft only open sourced two small libraries that only represent maybe 0.1% of Minecraft.

Just chiming in to say that I agree with what you said. I found the released libraries to be underwhelming to the point of almost uselessness based on the descriptions. I've written stuff like that for projects back when I was in school, and if I needed such tools, making my own would likely take about as much time as implementing someone else's.

At least half my class struggled (heavily) with recursion while implementing seach algorithms e.g. They all still got their degree as well...