Not sure about 'useful', but the first language taught in my college CS courses was Turbo Pascal. A bit OO, but also had pointers, etc... I guess it was fine.

Not sure about 'useful', but the first language taught in my college CS courses was Turbo Pascal. A bit OO, but also had pointers, etc... I guess it was fine. TBF though, where I went to school, after the first two classes students were expected to pick up the 'class language' for all future classes. This meant C in compiler and OS class, Java in data structures, Python and Lisp in some other classes. We were learning CS topics, and the given language was just a tool that could change depending on which teacher taught the class that semester. By the mention of Turbo Pascal above you can probably guess this was a long time ago. I'm sure schools have changed since then.