Instead of having 90% theory and 10% exercises it should be the opposite.

I can't agree more.

But you could argue that theory isn't confined by a language that might go out of date in a few year. Theory will serve you for the rest of your life.

@kevin51jiang True, theory is important as well. I recently saw an interesting concept in a TED talk: curiosity-driven education. https://code.berlin/en/concept/...
It'd be great to have this on all levels.

I was thinking maybe the best programmers at college are either the ones that do a lot of exercises or the ones that do own projects. So to have all students become good programmers you could have them make lots of exercises or projects. And give them lots of feedback on those, e.g. on code readibility, performance or reuse.