Thanks for the well thought out and thought-provoking reply!

>> In teaching these reluctant learners, I would work from the known to the
>> unknown -- a standard technique for teachers.

This is great advice and I'll be sure to give it a lot more
consideration.

>> These people have probably been hammering C for years

This is my fault for not being very clear. Actually the target audience
is an ASP/VBScript programmer, and a SQL developer who has focused on
Microsoft SQL Server 2000's DTS package development for the past few
years.

The mandate is that something is going to change. C# is up for
evaluation. Having done a lot of C#, used NHibernate, Aspect#, ASP.NET,
went to MonoRail, and then to Ruby and Rails, I'm very pro-Ruby.
Technically I suppose anything is up for evaluation, so we could throw
Java in the mix, but I don't see much reason to muddy the waters.

Naturally the more tools available the better IMO, and I plan to use C,
C++, C#, etc in the future, but I'm trying to make a focused effort
here and keep it simple.