I think your horrors would have been abbreviated with less to fall back on. I TAed intro CS in Java for a couple years and the vast majority of fundamental mis

I think your horrors would have been abbreviated with less to fall back on. I TAed intro CS in Java for a couple years and the vast majority of fundamental misunderstandings students had were caused by preconceptions and expectations of how things should have worked based on exactly this kind of previous experience. I think I spent at least as much time helping people un-learn things as I helped them learn novel concepts. In the short term Java and C are friendlier, but this friendliness allows a student to put off confrontation with the essence of programming in a way lisps do not.