Just trying to teach them that somewhere, down under all that runtime, there's a bunch of hardware which deals with the world 32 bits at a time, and that in the end all these magical "objects" really cook down to a bunch of memory addresses... yeow.

That's what I loved about being in computer engineering. You'll sit there and fill in charts of the cache, perform Tomasulo scheduling by hand, and by god at the end you'll have a pretty decent idea of how the machine does things. Not to say that CS students can't or don't learn the same thing, just that the ones I knew tended not to.

But you don't need all that stuff any more - you have garbage collection !

yeah, but the ones who actually care about CS probably do know most things covered in CODE.