> Enforcing OO from the outset is a terrible way to teach programming

I couldn't agree more! I've always taught C first. Give them good foundations on data types, functions, argument passing, how memory works with pointers in C, arrays, dynamic memory management, etc. Once that stuff is locked in, then OOP principles can be applied later with relative ease because the fundamentals are now there.

I tutor students in computer science courses and have seen so many students complain that they don't understand functions and data, yet their teacher has moved onto classes and objects.

The problem with teaching C++ and not C is the that too many teachers move too quickly to the OOP stuff because they feel that it somehow "replaces" non object C programming. This is not only wrong but dangerous because these students are rushed into OOP without understanding the problems it solves. Besides, not all problems are best solved with OOP.

The C programming language is actually a simple language. You'd be surprised at how quickly students can pick up concepts like pointers and dynamic memory management if the teacher only expose it to them early on and give them short projects to boost their understanding. Sadly, many teachers do the students a tremendous disservice by trying to avoid pointers because it gets in the way of teaching OOP. Or perhaps the teacher himself is rusty.

Just yesterday I was tutoring a student and he has never even seen a switch statement, never heard of new and delete, never heard of an enumeration and never knew how to pass a variable to a function by reference. This is his first course in C++. Yet the course has ended and the next course that follows in the spring starts with teaching const member functions! Have you ever heard of such crap in your life?

Talk about teaching bad code design... The teacher insists that the students call exit(1) in all their functions when the user inputs an incorrect value from the keyboard. As apposed to prompting the user and asking to try again.

Seriously... I'd love to meet this teacher and ask her how much programming in C++ she has done professionally.

By the way, this is supposed to be a very prestigious school in Westchester County New York. Then we all wonder why companies hire programmers from Israel and India.

I've been developing for the past 11+ years now and I've taught a few C/C++ courses along the way so I thought I'd throw my two cents in.

Now, I hate to say this but some of the curricula offered at some of these colleges are a sick joke! Is it me or do mathematics professors make bad computer programming instructors? Unfortunately, some of these fine institutions are too cheap to hire a separate computer programming instructor who is actually up to date with the rest of society and who has received the news that Java is no longer state-of-the-art.

I also think that these teachers are WAY too quick to rush into Object Oriented Programming (again because it's so "**state-of-the-art**") and not solidify the basics "like what a function is" or "what a variable is", etc. You would be amazed at how many students I've tutored where the teacher is explaining virtual function pointers and still 90% of the class still doesn't know how to pass an integer to a function!

Open source is really starting to get on my nerves. I'm really getting tired of these losers who have produced nothing but 3rd rate junkware with bad documentation at best, telling the rest of us that somehow we're all bad people if we charge money for the fruits of our labor.

I used to like Stallman but now he's becoming to nazi'ish about open source. To be honest, Firefox is one of the very few open source software packages out there that actually works well. Who cares about the license! Its a free download, it works well and that's that!

When Richard Stallman produces software that "everyday people" actually use, without having to go to a news group and ask questions, then he can open his mouth.