I tutored a friend who was in those OOP, Java, Intro to CS class. It was her second class of the series and she was so overwhelmed by all this stuff that was made for professional software engineers, that she just dropped that class. It wasn't mainly the courses fault that she left, she also forgot how to conjure up loops and how to use them, but knowing the professor she took last quarter (he likes to weed out people by making the class difficult) I can't really blame her for not having the enthusiasm to retain such information. I was in her shoes before, so I was very familiar with the "blank page" syndrom she was going through.

This "sink and swim" teaching mentality has to go. It seems like from this thread and the article that we are getting a better idea of how people like to learn programming. Let us actually put effort into teaching this way.