My point is that I feel the things that C illustrates and the style of programming it enforces are not that important to learn if you are just starting to progr

My point is that I feel the things that C illustrates and the style of programming it enforces are not that important to learn if you are just starting to program. If you are approaching it from an academic math/CS standpoint, you'd be better off teaching something much simpler like Scheme, and if you're approaching it from a building-cool-stuff sort of hands-on standpoint, I suggest you would be better off teaching Python, Ruby, or one of many other languages with less drudge work (a lot of syntax cruft, manual memory allocation, not very abstract) to do than C. There may be value to learning C, but I think it's not a good return on investment of your time until you understand many other foundational ideas about programming and CS.