People don't need to start in C. If we required that, there would be many fewer programmers. In University, our CS department got people started in Java (not th

People don't need to start in C. If we required that, there would be many fewer programmers. In University, our CS department got people started in Java (not the best starter language, but certainly cleaner than C) but our required OS course was in C. So, after being introduced to programming in a somewhat simpler form, you were required to spend a semester writing big projects in C, and you learned about pointers and memory allocation really fast. So, I agree that programmers should learn more about how these machines really work if they want to write good code, but I'm not convinced people should have to start at that level. Doing so would unnecessarily discourage people from learning to program. Imagine suggesting that everyone should learn to start programming in assembly. I think that's an analogous claim and is pretty silly. People starting to learn to program shouldn't be worrying about low level details or unnecessary syntax, they should be discovering the joy of creating programs.