I fully agree, a someone who has taught programming to people the one step that seems to take people from program copiers to programmers is the ability to read

I fully agree, a someone who has taught programming to people the one step that seems to take people from program copiers to programmers is the ability to read and understand error messages and warnings. The number of times the answer is staring people in the face is quite surprising. If you are actively ignoring warnings is it any wonder things don't work as expected. The question as to whether -Wall should be default is another issue but I hardly blame C++ for this issue.