[j1elo]

Maybe its just that the Java+Haskell one was simply a good teacher. Imagine you had them switched, so you would've had a bad teacher showing you how to program in Haskell and Java at the same time. Still to this day, your worst nightmares would be slow to load and express in terms of monads.

[Blackstone4]

Agreed. A good teacher is important.

However I still feel like C may not be the best first language as it's low level. This means there's a lot going on and more to learn for the average user so they end up getting stuck more often then if they used a language with memory management. This is based off the premise that the user is of average intelligence and you don't want to to put them off programming.

[j1elo]

I agree. In the first few months of my CS degree, first exposition to programming languages ever, and it was Pascal. Then they quickly moved to C, but at least that first impression was done with a leaner language that allowed us to concentrate on what is programming, what are common imperative language constructs, etc. without worrying much about fine details of the machine. I don't think I'd have grasped too well all that new information if I also had to be distracted with understanding all subtle gotchas and details of the C language.