[9248]

Speaking as a past student I'm really glad I started with C.

In the beginning, the fear of getting some random Segmentation fault out of nowhere actually taught me more than any textbook, school or best practices blog could ever do. It also forced me to learn how to use debuggers :)

[CJefferson]

That's what I tell my students, it's "character building", in the same way playing sports in the rain was as a child for me.

Also, many students previously did a course on Java, and clearly never really understood the basics, it's much easier in Java to play "keep tweaking and fixing the exceptions until it works, then don't touch it", particularly for introductory-level projects.