Right, because those of us on Slashdot are just doing so many threesomes these days.

Hmmm.... that's odd.... the Cylons must have managed to just miss all of Picon's wireless access points with their barrage of nukes. Or maybe it was just part of their "plan" all along?

Poll a few hundred English lit professors about which one novel you should start with to get a kid into the classics and you are going to get a few hundred very different and extremely opinionated answers. Put them all in the same room, and you'll get a lot of interesting arguments about it too.

My opinion? I've taught kids aged about 8-17 programming languages at summer computer camps for over 10 years, and I have otherwise been an educator for a while. Despite my own preferences and opinions, the truth is that unless you try to start someone out on INTERCAL, language doesn't matter. It's not like Bobby would have become a phenomenal programmer, except you erroneously chose Language X to start him off with, and he hated it, so he became a hair stylist instead.

If someone doesn't do well at all with C++, while BASIC for example might be less scary, in my experience it makes no difference to reapproach programming with the different language. At least as far as making a difference between having a real interest/performance, and the distinct lack thereof. If someone is going to "get" programming, they'll be able to get it with any common programming language. Period.

Furthermore, a kid's understanding of a programming language is going to depend much more on the quality of the tutoring/teaching/etc. methodologies, but that's another topic for another time.

Probably should have lined up my pronouns better -- I was trying to say that regardless of the legitimacy of claims that "downloads don't lead to lost sales", people are going to download things illegally simply because it doesn't feel that illegal.

The fundamental problem with many "digital things" (like in this case, music and video files) is that there is a huge disconnect between their expected real-world analogs and the actual laws (both physical and legal) governing the digital-world in which they exist.

The fundamental technical know-how to write programs from scratch to make high-quality copies of media files is really pretty rare. Just the same way that say actually painting an excellent replica of a Rembrandt is something that very few people can do. The main difference is that once someone writes a program to copy media files (which may even be a perfectly legal commercial piece of software to begin with) the dissemination of such a program is absolutely trivial. Teaching the population how to paint stunning rip-offs of Rembrandts isn't just not trivial, it's impossible.

Yes, a few people talk of the myths of lost sales and such, but honestly that's all retrospective crap.

The truth is that psychologically, if you can do something with a couple clicks of a button while you sit at home eating potato chips in your living room, it doesn't feel that illegal, regardless of what the law is or isn't.

I'll even make a car analogy. Say that my mother holds the law in very high regard, even when it comes to piracy. If I go and visit her in a stolen car, she will at minimum yell at me quite profusely, and it wouldn't be unforeseeable that she might call the authorities. But if we go for a drive (in my own un-stolen car) and listen to things from my MP3 player, she wouldn't even think to ask if the music was procured legally. If I told her that it was all downloaded illegally, she may tell me that it isn't right, but she's still probably going to be listening to the music, and there's also no way she's reporting the illegal downloads to any authority.

Up until a few years ago, I taught programming languages at a few different summer computer camps, to kids basically ranging about 9-17 years old, for a total of about nine or ten summers. And for what it's worth, I also currently work full-time in a science/tech program for middle school and high school students in an urban area.

For the not-yet-(anywhere near-)college age groups, I have found that C++ is by far and wide the best teaching language, mainly due to its flexibility. That is, you can cover OOP if you want, but you don't have to. You can cover interaction with actual computer memory, but you don't have to. Etc. I think that is a much more important premise than narrowing the root of programming excellence down to one singular paradigm.

The actual discipline of computer science, like virtually all academic fields, is not actually laid out in a nice, neat, linear, easy-to-teach, and trivially-defined path. C++ gives new learners of CS many different avenues to branch out to without the rigors of learning multiple languages as an initiation ritual. Say what you want about the language in general (or for any other specific purposes) but it is an absolutely fantastic teaching language because it has the potential to cover many important paradigms.