From a comment I made 2 years ago when this paper was brought up: I've been fairly skeptical of this paper ever since reading Alan Kay's rebuttal: http://www.s

From a comment I made 2 years ago when this paper was brought up: I've been fairly skeptical of this paper ever since reading Alan Kay's rebuttal: http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp I trust Kay much more than these authors on matters of computer science, teaching, or ideas in general. To expand a bit, I've since mentored over a dozen students and I've found that in most cases of students who couldn't program well, the issue was "further upstream." That is, there was some misunderstanding at a more fundamental level that was preventing them from continuing forward. Once that issue was fixed, they rapidly catch up to where they should be.