[josh_nyc]

I think they are referring to the fact that students new to programming learn to "always" rely on stringing together pre-existing libraries (namely in Java) rather than gaining experience by creating some functionality, algorithms, etc. from scratch.

FWIW, I took a class taught by Shonberg (about OOP) when I attended NYU. Ironically NYU CS majors are required to take several classes that use Java, so I guess he wasn't able to convince the administration of his views. However, I learned a tremendous amount from the algorithms and OS courses there, and there were some great classes still using C and C++.