http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/

 We are close to agreeing. As you said C++ has many features that were added to the language with OOP in mind. If you do not know OOP concept it is unlikely, though not impossible, that you are using those features to their fullest if at all.

As a counter example, templates is a feature in C++ that can be used to great benefit without any OOP concepts getting involved. So yes you can accomplish many tasks with C++ without using OOP concepts, but you are unlikely to be using C++ to its fullest.

But still considering all you can do with C++ without OOP, if I was interviewing an engineer that claimed to be a senior C++ engineer and he did not have a handle on OOP concepts, I would not consider hiring him into a senior role. For that matter a senior engineer period, be it for Java, Objective C, .NET, javascript, actionscript, or any other modern language development. 

Why C++?  Why not drop down even further into asm?  Understanding stack logic and register processing brings one even closer to machine code than C right?  ^_^

Well learning the basics is quite simple , but in the programming world there's a lot of shit you have to master. It really takes years to fully understand a language programming. But i think it all dependes in the effort you put to it

 which is why all good programmers should take machine architecture classes.

EDIT: although i do think C++ does hit the sweet spot.   

It's definitely possible to start with asm and then keep moving up the ladder, and I'm sure you'd get many good programmers with that approach. However, I'd say that starting with C gives you about the same results, without scaring off some of the people who wouldn't be attracted to asm as a first language.

It's a matter of finding the sweet spot, I for one think that C is a good place to start, with asm and higher level languages afterwards.

we're getting to "favorite first language" discussion territory :)

In fact, all programmers should learn some asm.  The reason to start with C is because there is only one C.  There are umpteen different kinds of asm for umpteen different CPU architectures.  C will still teach you the important aspects of "speaking computer" as well as aspects of programming languages.

C++ is a good start. It was my first "real" language (I don't count the dicking around with QBasic that I did in elementary school).

But you should also take the time to learn something that is a bit more than a simple abstraction over machine code. Lisp was a good language for me. It's a language with the sophistication to allow you to express things the way you want to express them rather than forcing you to think like the machine.

You also need to read up on the standard repertoire of algorithms and data structures (start with sorting algorithms and move onto binary trees). If I had known those things before I went to college I might have actually accomplished things during my early days in programming.

LOGO ftw!

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