Most harmful misconception of beginners about programming?
language-agnostic
Solution
Re-inventing standard library functions/classes.
After going through a language book/tutorial, most beginners - knowing how to handle strings and numbers - will invent their own date functions, their own 'compression algorithms', their own SORT implementations.
Oh, and they always spend their first day searching for `clrscr();`.
Problem
Possible Duplicate: What is your longest-held programming assumption that turned out to be incorrect? What do you consider to be the most harmful misconception about programming from people who are new to programming that you have seen?