[nostalgeek]

Nah. I started with Flash and would never have had a programming career if I had to start with C, gcc, make and all that bullshit.

Learning C by itself is interesting because obviously a professional programmer needs to know how memory is managed and laid out at a lower level in a computer, and how higher programming languages themselves are implemented.

But you don't need to start with C to actually teach programming, what is a function, what is a loop or a variable, or to teach algorithms, data structure, or problem solving.

People often complain about "the lack of diversity" in tech, well I can tell you people who think C should be the first programming language of any CS student are a severe hindrance to bring that diversity to tech.

Teach Processing or Python, make students create interactive apps on mobile phones with a visual or audio feedback thanks to a simple environment or language. They will be no less of a programmer if they succeed in creating a multiplayer mobile game in the space of a few month because you didn't burden them with malloc, pointers or null terminated strings and macros.