I think using C for everything is overkill. At some point keeping track of low level details stops being enlightening and just becomes a PITA. I'm biased, but

I think using C for everything is overkill. At some point keeping track of low level details stops being enlightening and just becomes a PITA. I'm biased, but I think my university took a good approach. In one class sophomore year we had to implement Quicksort and some other algorithms in MIPS assembly language. The rest of our classes used Java or whatever else was installed on the Linux machines in the computer lab. It let us see what was going on under the hood without the tedium of having to do it for everything.