> C has so many weird and painful quirks, and is missing a lot of things that a novice programmer will need to know (like object-orientation, especially). I do

> C has so many weird and painful quirks, and is missing a lot of things that a novice programmer will need to know (like object-orientation, especially). I don't think you can understand OO properly without C or another sufficiently low level language. You might learn the concepts at a high level, but it's still important to know at a low level, you know to know about the vtable of function pointers that makes inheritance possible, otherwise you will never truly grasp OO. Also, I'd prefer most devs learn to write functions that operate on data long before they learn how to combine them into a horrible mess.