The flamewars surrounding Spolsky's The Perils of JavaSchools have settled down already, so I thought I could offer you a funny quote of those. First, the part the fellow here quotes from Joel:

[Universities are] not vocational schools! It shouldn't be their job to train people to work in industry.... the bottom line is that a JavaSchool that won't teach C and won't teach Scheme is not really teaching computer science, either.

Then, then fellow himself:

If universities are supposed to be forward-thinking and promote such thinking, then is it useful for them to be teaching C and Scheme? After all, these languages are much older then Java. What is to be learned from using C and Scheme except that the older languages are much harder to learn and use? One doesn't need to use a horse and buggy to realize that the automobile offers an easier mode of transportation for the masses.

Talk about missing the point. Completely.

Scheme isn't harder to learn and use than Java. It just gets you to the really hard parts of programming faster. And Spolsky argues that many of the people studying programming with Java don't get to the hard parts at all. (In studying, that is, the hardness will hit to their face in other ways later, though.)

And yes, programming by its nature is hard. It's just that The Hardness will reveal itself in various forms.