Those are all valid points. However, I am teaching an introductory programming course and I have seen many a student terribly confused by manual memory managem

Those are all valid points. However, I am teaching an introductory programming course and I have seen many a student terribly confused by manual memory management and low level data types. My hope is to be able to introduce the very basic parts of programming (variables, assignment, branching, looping, functions) without having to go into any OOP or containers. There are always people who will never get even those most basic concepts, but there might be some who will get a basic glimpse of what programming means who would otherwise fail at basic C data types. In the end, they will all need to understand all of Python, then C, then (sadly) Matlab. What you are describing is indeed very interesting. One has to be very careful to not introduce too many concepts too early. So maybe, one should restrict looping to while loops until lists are introduced. And string processing could be taken as the introduction to OOP.