I agree. Speaking as someone about to graduate in CS, having started with C, a simple assembly language (LC-3), and later focusing on C++, I've found picking up

I agree. Speaking as someone about to graduate in CS, having started with C, a simple assembly language (LC-3), and later focusing on C++, I've found picking up new languages fairly easy with the stronger understanding of what's going on underneath. Obviously I'll never know what it's like learning higher level languages first, but I'm definitely happy with the path my school uses. For example, learning manual memory management and instilling habits around needing to worry about this made learning Java and C# a breeze. I can't imagine moving from a language with garbage collection to C would be as easy or smooth.