<p>After experiencing BlueJ (AP Comp Sci in some schools) vs my beloved Eclipse at work, I would say the development environment is far more important than the language. C++ on Visual Studio is about as idiot proof as it gets (and Dr. Java is not that bad either - what DD2 uses in AP CS). Trying to get GCC to work under Eclipse is not quite as straightforward for debugging etc as Visual Studio. Eclipse is good but not THAT good…</p>