I'm in a C++ school mostly. They've just finished a transition towards a modular curriculum and exam system. We're also doing Groovy for the OODP module but I'm

I'm in a C++ school mostly. They've just finished a transition towards a modular curriculum and exam system. We're also doing Groovy for the OODP module but I'm finding that there's a split between a well-established and very high standard for teaching C++ and a very ill-disciplined and poorly taught Groovy module. For background: I've been in the industry 15 years already, used PERL, TCL, Java and C# daily in different roles. I would definitely say that knowing C++ and relating that to Computer Systems (or whatever your hardware/operating systems module is), and then looking at compilers and modern languages from that perspective is the way to go. Whatever you learn should be transferable. The core concepts of C++ (when taught like C) are pretty universal. Implementing and using various data structures and algorithms is way more important than familiarity with a particular API or language library. I really dislike the Groovy stuff we're doing because it places an over-reliance on teaching the meta-object and programming that rather than teaching GoF patterns that are easily applicable to any language. I guess what I'm saying... skip language specific stuff. Have the core concepts taught. Those are transferable, those provide an essence... the real understanding of what happens where and how. That's the stuff that can be taken and applied anywhere.