This became a very interesting discussion. I don't think I have ever bookmarked more sites in one day than today. And I don't program for a living any more. Always a geek I guess. Nice to know I'm not the only one.

I've also forgotten how to punctuate when it does'nt create a syntax error.

I disagree and agree. OO for the sake of OO does not make sense. Before I did OO built large, reusable code libraries. OO came into it's own with me when I understood the principles enough to write classes pretty much from scratch so I was not trying to work around the limitations of some one else's implementation. It took me years to get competent at writing truly reusable OO code. I can't imagine teaching it from scratch. Start out using a OOP language as a "better" procedural language and OOP stuff comes in gradually, after learning program structure, design, code reuse etc. But then again, hindsight is a handy pair of rose colored glasses.

I know it's not available, but Delphi (v7 or less) is OOP as hell. There was a open source Object Pascal (or something, I never looked at it because my employers always supplied me with the latest version Delphi Enterprise).

I am not a big C++ programmer, but as a C programmer, I remember learning C++ as "a better C" (not all the class library complications). If I recall correctly, C++ was pretty much billed as "a better C" back in the early 90's, but I forget things a lot now... way too old.

Pascal: agree. I learned Turbo Pascal about 100 years ago, the compiler I got (for free, from Borland) came with Turbo Debugger/Assembler. Learned Pascal quik, and learned ASM from Looking at the Turbo Debugger output. Coming directly from COBOL to PC programming, it made the landing a lot softer. With that said, now there are so many alternatives than 20 years ago. What ever became of the idea of looking at compiler output in ASM with the input source code as comments?

I agree. I've programmed in more languages than I can remember (or fit on a resume), and I have found that learning a new language is easiest when I do something that does something cool on screen. IMHO.

I believe If IF Then Then is doable in Forth.