[userbinator]

In my experience, those who start teaching with HLLs are aimed more at producing developers that have some minimal level of competence to enter the industry, rather than ones who actually understand what computers are and how they work. While the former is perfectly acceptable for a lot of things, the latter are important because they tend to be the ones who can easily debug difficult problems. IMHO teaching kids HLLs does nothing to dispel (and if anything, furthers) the notion that computers are mysterious magical devices rather than machines that simply follow a list of instructions and manipulate bits. The latter is particularly important as computers become more prevalent in society, people who know nothing about how they work will be less inclined to present good arguments for the issues of privacy, encryption, etc.