For programmers familiar with Ruby or Python, my experience is that the main points of confusion are all around what is happening in memory. What is a Ruby Str

For programmers familiar with Ruby or Python, my experience is that the main points of confusion are all around what is happening in memory. What is a Ruby String/Array/Hash/etc., _really_? That sort of thing. It might seem trivial to you, but the idea that you have a bunch of 1s and 0s in memory that the computer somehow "knows" is an integer or a character or whatever else is a HUGE intellectual hurdle for people who haven't considered it before. For that reason, I think it's a mistake to put a student in a situation where they're grappling with both memory and things like calling conventions simultaneously and for the first time. I can't comment on Pascal, but I don't think C++ is an accurate reflection of the computer's own perspective on how work is happening. The main thing C does is make the way your program interacts with memory much more visceral. There's the added benefit that the most popular interpreters for Ruby and Python (MRI and CPython, respectively) are written in C. This gives the teacher an opportunity to connect concepts in C _directly_ to already-understood concepts from another context. All in all, I think the debate about which language(s) to learn is overstated, albeit one that programmers love to have for tribal reasons. The same concepts are embedded in all of them in different ways. The important thing is extracting, isolating, and abstracting those concepts.