i am one of those young programmers that loves intellisense, code snippets, etc. and thank you to anyone that makes programming easier!!! however, i am also one of those programmers that was originally taught at a U.S. univeristy how first program on paper, then C, and the C++ (and yes we covered dynamic memory allocation/deallocation, templates, etc.). i completely agree that to be a great programmer, you must understand the "magic" behind how it all works. i'm a .NET guy and professionally, i write lots of server side code where i don't have lots of "fun" drag n drop opportunities, but rather just use straight up C# - and to be honest, .NET is programming candy because it's so easy, yet powerful. but don't be fooled - high level .NET languages all compile down to MSIL (which is striking similar to what C++ compiles down to) and is run on the CLR. if you want to play around with this psuedo assembly stuff, just toy around with the System.Reflection.Emit namespace or the MSIL Disassembler. all of this .NET stuff are thing that the univeristy didn't teach - so let's disspell the degree/self-taught argument now - different things work for different people; in the end, the better programmer will prevail. so in my opinion, teaching both the science and art of programming isn't necessarily dead, but there certainly are lots of folks taking short cuts or just haven't been exposed to the full range of fundamentals or advanced topics of programming. there... i'm done! :)