The "[language] programmer" (where [language] usually = Java or .NET) trend is a misguided attempt by industry to commoditize programmer talent.
At the introductory level, I think the biggest issue is teaching "computational thinking" [1] or "procedural literacy" [2]: getting people thinking about the idea that you're writing specifications for a machine to carry out computations. From that perspective, it's best to pick a language that lets you get to algorithmic logic as quickly as possible.
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/Wing0...
[2] http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasOTH2005....
I hated C++. I still think it's a fairly terrible language. But, for fun I took the Harvard CS50 course to refresh my knowledge of C and I found that WAY better than my C++ course. I think C is brilliant for introducing programming because it's very very simple, yet also very very difficult. There's not much to learn, except a lot of concepts (memory usage, data structures, etc).
I also think Objective-C is a really great language though, so I might be crazy. But, you give me a choice between C++ and a language that is basically C with a few additional keywords and garbage collection, and I find that an easy choice...
I also think Objective-C is pretty good though, especially with the addition of ARC. It's like a better C, with Smalltalk-style objects and a lot more (mutable and immutable) datatype options. Much saner and less painful than C++, but more challenging than Java.
Countless Java bugs are introduced by programmers who don't understand what operations give you a copy of something, and which ones give you a reference to something
These two statements seem to be at odds with each other.
When I started with eclipse + Java, within hours my perception of Java was that it was really more of 'fill up the blanks' rather than programming.
Of course, you get the same thing in Java when you first encounter a NullPointerException, ;)
C/C++ programmers tend to do premature optimization (habit) due to the culture and the problem domain (past experience): device driver, kernel code, game development.
How important Pointer is for say learning any high-level programming language that don't have pointers (pretty much everything outside C/C++/Objective-C)?
Sometimes I felt that knowing Pointer arithmetic and tricks are some sort of chess-thumping that old programmers tend to do. (My background is system programming so I know how pointer works).
It doesn't matter what you know or learn during the university. What matters is whether you continue to hone your skill or not and have a high bar of quality.
References in high level languages are mostly hidden pointers. A good knowledge of how pointers work is really important to get a good understanding of how high level languages work (a lot of Java programmers don't well understand the distinction between value and reference types, for instance).
Likely, be at ease with recursion is also very important as many complex problems are recursive by nature, and so way easier to solve using functional techniques.
Or the best, easiest and clearest way to do things... Sure you can write confusing crap with pointers, but they are very useful.
From what I can experience in the multi-site enterprise projects I participate, the industry is being quite successful at that.
Successful at producing high-quality software, relative to the resources they are expending on it? Not so much.
Yes this is what I mean.
In most enterprise companies nowadays, developers are seen as easy to replace programming cogs.
> Successful at producing high-quality software, relative to the resources they are expending on it? Not so much.
Who cares about quality when the price is right?! :)
Being sarcastic here, I am the opinion the software industry should be under the same quality regulations and expectations as the other industries.
Usually most people return stuff that does not work properly, while with software they just live with whatever bugs the software has.