[lmm]

> Pythons “ease of teaching” actually could yield bad systems engineers, because it shields users from the system...

Not necessarily. Most of what it "shields" users from is unnecessary ceremony and clutter rather than relevant system behaviour.

> Honestly, I would personally teach plain C for algorithms because it has the simple for loops and while loops, tail-call recursion, arrays and structures.

C's loops are not simple, C implementations do not generally have tail calls, C makes the distinction between arrays and pointers far too subtle (which not only confuses learners but also causes bugs in real code), C's structure support is bad (primitive unchecked unions, but no support for proper disjoint sum types). It may have been useful as a portable assembler at one point (back when it was compiled in simple fashion), but it's not a good language for anything these days.