I actually have come across this before. I am currently a senior computer science student at a university. Not trying to sling any mud, just making an observation, but during the introduction to programming courses, our courses contained computer science students as well as information systems (a business major oriented towards minor programming). The major observation that I made about these I.S. students is that they could not grasp how things worked on a conceptual level. I would be willing to bet that it was because of the same reason mentioned by tachyon, where C.S students already had a background in programming, and understood (conceptually, at least) what was going on, the I.S. Students were being told how to do things (in java, say, "I need to see how many elements are in this Vector", and they were told, use vecname.size(), instead of being told that the vector (at least in java) has an underlying array, and when you call vecname.size(), you are actually counting how many elements are in that underlying array. (a poor example, but it illustrates the point)).

Anyway, I think that if we want good programmers, we need to teach them what the hell is going on before expecting them to be able to craft an excellent program (that sounds pretty basic, but you would be surprised at how many times I have heard stupid stuff come from people). The people are not at fault, it is the programming ideology. We cant expect people to learn if we dont teach them.

Thanks for the vine!
E-Bitch