Most of the C I wrote was while in college. I think understanding the question, "why are strings in C hard?" is a good gateway to understanding how programming

Most of the C I wrote was while in college. I think understanding the question, "why are strings in C hard?" is a good gateway to understanding how programming languages and memory work generally. I agree with you though that teaching C as introductory is probably not the best — our "Programming in C" course was taken in sophomore year. I wouldn't want to use it my day job, but I'm glad that it was taught in university just to give the impression that string manipulation is not quite as straightforward as it's made to appear in other languages. The early days of Swift also reminded me of this problem – strings get even more challenging when you begin to deal with unicode characters, etc.