>I actually think that someone who is incapable or even worse, unwilling to learn programming using C, has no business programming anything at all of any import

>I actually think that someone who is incapable or even worse, unwilling to learn programming using C, has no business programming anything at all of any import, beyond the most toy-example tiny scripts here and there. I'm a C hacker, and I do agree with this 100%. And keep in mind, when I say "introductory", I'm talking a 1 semester class at most. I'm not saying that it should necessarily be any more than that. >Furthermore my (admittedly curmudgeonly) take on the C vs "high level languages" debate is that learning something like Python "first" because it's "easier" is actually sort of damaging, in that the student will learn these "high level" concepts without any clue about the underlying implementation. They will then have to learn a bunch of "bag of tricks" that will seem arbitrary to them, and a bunch of "gotchas" to avoid, again, that will seem arbitrary to them, because they have no concept of things like the cost of memory copying (passing-by-value giant arrays as arguments to functions, etc). Honestly, starting out with C++ when I was in my early teens(I'm in my late 20's now), a lot of those "bag of tricks" stuff I use daily was pretty much magic to me for a long time. It wasn't until I started to learn about dynamic memory management and serious data structure concepts in high school and college that it began to make sense. That's why I think that the higher level languages are great for learning the basics of program flow control and basic computer data handling. The students don't need to know how dynamic memory allocation works at that point, but they will soon. The overall point is that a well rounded, theoretical CS education should be teaching that the languages we use are closer to standard tools than the end-all of our products. There will be times where a high-level language will suit your needs perfectly well, and times where a low level language will have the raw power that you need, with the caveat of potentially needing a lot more thought and work to get the same results.