Agreed. When I did my undergrad, Ada was the primary language of instruction for first year, with x86 assembler taught as a subject in the second semester. Th

Agreed. When I did my undergrad, Ada was the primary language of instruction for first year, with x86 assembler taught as a subject in the second semester. The idea being to get us thinking about programming correctness from the beginning, then to teach how the machine worked once we had a good foundation. By second year we were just expected to know C, and coming from assembler, things like pointers were something I never had a problem understanding. Start high to get a good grounding, go low to understand how everything works, then return high to write code that has a good grounding in how it will be executed on the machine.