Hi all, I've just spent the last hour readling all the postings that happened over the weekend, and here's my thoughts. 1) A lot of Frank said is right - there you go Frank, bet you never expected to read that? I am, however, not as emotionally charges as Frank. 2) VB should NOT EVER BE TOUGHT TO ANYONE EVER!!!! (Okay, I get emotional sometimes). Recording Macro's, then editing them is ABSOLUTELY the wrong way to get into learning. I like to think that I am young enough to remember my school/college days and the process I went through to learn my profession, while being old enough to be able to look back objectively. The methods used to teach me, I believe are just as valid today as they were then. Structure, order, logic, and top-down analysis and design are essential if we are to teach proper programming - irrespective of which language we use. We used to write our programs on coding sheets and walk across the campus to key them into gwbasic on DOS 3.3 8086 PC clones. We made sure the program was correct *before* we even touched keyboard. Now I know that is a little extreme, but the basic concept is still there. I believe that the teachers who that think that 7 year old kids will get bored not writing a GUI program are not doing these kids any justice. However, at the same time, there is no reason why this same structured teaching could not be used with something like Delphi, Kylix, etc. which will give them some eye-candy and help motivate them. The User Interface, be it a GUI or a TUI, or even a command line, is a valid and diffecult topic to cover, and such tools as Delphi/Kylix, or KDevelop/Glade would be excelent here, but when teaching programming, the main goal should always be qualitity of code, again, irrespective of language. As for the other topics of this thread, I remain quiet as I do not hold enough information/experience to hold an opinion, but I do hold the fear that this country is going to get to the point that we will not have enough real programmers, and get stuck with grown-up 'script kiddies' (For real, read correctly trained program analysts/designers/coders) I think that this will be true in many other industries too. -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000