Until recently De Anza College had C as their introductory programming language (and even now, their C++ courses appear to be nothing more than a warmed over C

Until recently De Anza College had C as their introductory programming language (and even now, their C++ courses appear to be nothing more than a warmed over C with slightly different syntax). My opinion is that that was a horrible choice-students spend waaaaay too much time bogged down in pointers and memory allocation, and less time thinking about algorithms and just getting used to writing code. C/C++ are excellent languages to learn, but dear god, at an upper division level.