I don't think it's a bad beginner language at all. It's low level enough to learn about the inner workings in a structured way, but it's high level enough to no

I don't think it's a bad beginner language at all. It's low level enough to learn about the inner workings in a structured way, but it's high level enough to not run into segmentation errors all the time. In some courses they wrote Java bytecode as a substitute for an assembly language, which seems completely sensible to me since it'll be more broadly applicable than a specific ISA. Setting up the tooling was a pain though. I did the JavaFX parts of the exam without ever having used it because I (with the help of multiple Linux nerds!) couldn't get it to run on Arch.