Me too (well, ok, my first programming class was in Fortran taught by a 85 year old man who spent most of the time telling us about how much harder it was back when you had to use fortran).
I hated C++. I still think it's a fairly terrible language. But, for fun I took the Harvard CS50 course to refresh my knowledge of C and I found that WAY better than my C++ course. I think C is brilliant for introducing programming because it's very very simple, yet also very very difficult. There's not much to learn, except a lot of concepts (memory usage, data structures, etc).
I also think Objective-C is a really great language though, so I might be crazy. But, you give me a choice between C++ and a language that is basically C with a few additional keywords and garbage collection, and I find that an easy choice...
C++ is terrifying, and teaching an introductory programming course in C++ is an awful idea. Using plain C would make much more sense. C is also a better choice than Java because Java doesn't force you to learn about pointers, or memory in general, really. Countless Java bugs are introduced by programmers who don't understand what operations give you a copy of something, and which ones give you a reference to something (especially if that something is mutable).
I also think Objective-C is pretty good though, especially with the addition of ARC. It's like a better C, with Smalltalk-style objects and a lot more (mutable and immutable) datatype options. Much saner and less painful than C++, but more challenging than Java.
Java doesn't force you to learn about pointers, or memory in general, really.
Countless Java bugs are introduced by programmers who don't understand what operations give you a copy of something, and which ones give you a reference to something
These two statements seem to be at odds with each other.
I hated C++. I still think it's a fairly terrible language. But, for fun I took the Harvard CS50 course to refresh my knowledge of C and I found that WAY better than my C++ course. I think C is brilliant for introducing programming because it's very very simple, yet also very very difficult. There's not much to learn, except a lot of concepts (memory usage, data structures, etc).
I also think Objective-C is a really great language though, so I might be crazy. But, you give me a choice between C++ and a language that is basically C with a few additional keywords and garbage collection, and I find that an easy choice...