As I was reading thru this article, one question kept popping into my head: what kind of bugs occur when you don't initially teach people logic? If students are exposed to programming for months before they ever see loops or logic, is it easier for them to understand the concepts or do the same semantic errors occur?

Regardless of loops/logic, what kind of bugs do people have when they are first learning OOP? Are there differences between novices and producural programmers in the type of bugs/errors? [think: SIGCSE paper] Does logic come easier for mathematically oriented people?

The other thing that bothers me is that I want to know, if the discussed statistics are representative of all novices, how can we teach logic/loops so that it is not so confusing? I assume shoving a myriad of examples down their throats is bad. Two paragraphs on explaining misconceptions about a language does not really explain how educators can help students. Somehow, I have a feeling the authors did not really know...

Regarding your comment on bug that arrise in OOP, I'm sure the TA's in the class have a much better idea of the kinds of bugs that arrise with novice and experienced programmers. I'd be interested to hear the TA's side of that issue as the students' side is probably very different.

Are there a lot of language questions? Do they happen thoughout the semester? I'd be interested in discussing this topic if breifly.