I'd argue that if you need to learn it eventually anyway, you might as well do it as soon as possible and get more out of STL (a fair bit of questions regarding lists, iterators etc posted here could have been avoided if they knew how a linked list works). It's not weeks of studying for gods sake... It takes maybe 5 hours to build a decent linked list from scratch if you don't know anything about it - and that time includes googling for help.

It's also a generic knowledge applicable in most languages and programming situations... STL is only in C++ (though most modern languages does have an equivalent).

You're right. I would not give that advice. But as Jonatan pointed out, Allegro is not the standard template library. I said that I don't think the point of the STL (or C++) is to allow people to program stuff without understanding it; but rather to allow people to write object orientated code that is easy to read and has a reliable foundation. On the other hand, I do think that part of the purpose of Allegro is to allow programmers to do things without understanding the details.

Regardless of what you or I think STL and Allegro are for, I would still recommend that anyone who wants to learn about programming should at some point use dynamically allocated arrays (do-it-yourself 'vectors') and write their own linked list implementation. I know that I understand pointers and memory addresses and computers in general a lot better for having done those things myself, and the knowledge I've gained from it has enabled me to do more complicated things.

Is this a good thing though? Encouraging laziness in students seems to be a modern trend.

If their eyes glaze over when you start talking about those things, they are not lazy; they are stupid, and should get a different major.

Well, I guess we can't all be geniuses like your holiness. Luckily the real world isn't so picky; if they booted everyone who didn't understand pointers after a week of instruction, there'd be maybe a dozen C/C++ programmers in the world.

Read my post. Read his reply. We aren't talking about retards, were talking about a particular person being extremely arrogant.

I recommend learning to make your own linked list before using the STL to do it for you, mostly for the reasons given above. You learn more about what's really going on, which could help you debug things that are going wacky in your code. And it helps with other things that involve similar concepts.

I'm glad my programming teacher made us implement linked lists ourselves instead of just teaching us how to use java's linked list class. Sure, I'll probably use the pre-made class most of the time when I'm actually coding, but I'll know what it's doing when I use it.

Ok, seriously, you're grasping at straws now. Why don't you go ahead and cite a few intro to C++ books or show us the syllabus from a course that teaches pointers "before anything else"? I'm sure you know as well is I do that the vast, overwhelming majority of people who teach C++ disagree with you.

Source? Are you the majority?

In fact, the major for Computer Science at my university has 6 hours dedicated to data structures. Just data structures.

Not understanding the basics of what is going on in a computer is great, if all you want to do professionally is make websites using ASP.NET. You won't be able to write the fancy backend code that does all the hard work, because you will have no idea how to solve the most rudimentary problems that comprise that one.