Have you taken a look at the Scheme based course at eIMACS?

http://www.eimacs.com/Parent_CSAFCOverview.htm

Your post sounded like C memory programming is a bad thing!

They don't teach pointers and recursion anymore? Very useful things there, and that's only scratching the surface. I hate to say this, but I still have the Pascal book I bought for my high school AP computer science class because it is to this day may favorite book on the topic of introductory computer science. I have yet to find another like it. It most definitely has recursion, and I'm assuming pointers, although we didn't use those much with Pascal - used all over the place in C though!

For those of you who do not know what recursion is, simply go to google.com and type in recursion. Look at the very first line of the response.

@levans

i took AP Comp Sci and they did indeed teach recursion, but my teacher discouraged us from using it. we did not cover pointers in the class (as it was in Java) but I did in a C++ class that i took

Two points:
1) This article exaggerates the differences between C/C++ and Java. The author laments the decline in the teaching of recursion and pointers and associates this development with the emergence of Java. Recursion is just as natural in Java as in C, and when I took AP Comp Sci, it was discussed extensively. It is true that Java programmers would not be as familiar with pointers, but implementing structures such as linked lists (which would be done with pointers in C) is just as easy and natural in Java. There are, I concede, important differences in usability. With Java, you do not have to worry about memory allocation, which is rarely interesting, and you are warned (as you should be) when you go outside of the bounds of an array. Some may think of these features as "dumbing down", but in fact, they let the student focus on the interesting things - for instance, the abstract features of the algorithm and data structures. This brings me to my second point.
2) The language doesn't really matter that much anyways. Beyond the first year, most computer science classes should be basically language agnostic (perhaps learning a functional language could be an exception to this). For instance, when you are learning about algorithms, the language is pretty much irrelevant; specifically, language choice does not impact run-time asymptotics. When you want to describe an algorithm more precisely than would be possible with plain English, you use pseudocode. If you have to implement something, you should be allowed to use whatever language is least distracting to you. At Harvard, CS 124, the course on Algorithms and Data Structures, is taught like this, and the method works remarkably well - you get a broader appreciation for the "big picture" that comes from not obsessing over the distracting little implementation details.

I tend to disagree with this article which basically states that learning a "hard programming" language makes you a better programmer and allows to differentiate between good and bad programmers.

A programming language is just used to implement a solution to a given problem. Regardless of the programming language, as a software engineer I am usually able to distinguish between an elegant implementation and a poor one.

As for C, yes it is a hard programming language and why not let the programming environment take care of some tasks (e.g., memory deallocation) if this can be done efficiently? And why not, learn 486 assembler?

As for pointer, Java does not have explicitly pointers as most objects are implicitly pointers. A linked list can simply be implemented by an object containing a reference to the next object... trivial...