[ShadowAce]

Everything you've described is about structure. New geeks (fresh graduates) prefer the lack of structure, which means more freedom, and less debugging.

Just MHO, of course, but that's what it seems like to me.

[OneWingedShark]

>Everything you’ve described is about structure.

Indeed, structure /= undesirable.
Looking at spoken languages, structure is quite important for conveying meaning; thus the differences in:
I’m so afraid.
I’m afraid so.
and
So[,] I’m afraid.

All of these are valid English, and all have different meaning.
I’ve heard that Chinese is a ‘structureless’ language insofar as noun/verb placement.

>New geeks (fresh graduates) prefer the lack of structure, which means more freedom, and less debugging.

An incorrect assumption, on their part, IMO.
Take ‘typeless’ languages where you have to test everything’s ‘type.’ (i.e. Is_Number(), Is_Letter(), Is_whitespace(), Is_HexNumber() style tests.) And the automatic promotion can give odd results, strongly-typed languages with the ‘Variant’ type show this same susceptibility.

Less debugging can come from MORE structure, such as Ada’s strong-typing, where the compiler simply will not compile violating code.

>Just MHO, of course, but that’s what it seems like to me.

It seems that way to me too; though the programming-friends I talk to about it generally seem to be swayed toward [some of] my viewpoints after they gain more experience.