Learn C, Then Learn Computer Science

In the high school computer science courses I was able to take, the programs were relatively simple with an, in my opinion, too-overt emphasis on object oriented programming. It was in java, and very little of the class focused on the "how" aspect of the language.

My first CS courses at university were in Ada. I don't know how many of y'all have programmed in Ada, but I think about it like a wordier C that doesn't let you just get away with shit because it's strongly typed. This was the language we were taught basic control structures in and, to be fair, the way we were taught focused on good styling so that our code would be unreadable mush.

The UNIX class was in C, and it is, in my opinion, the most rigorous course that most of the students will take on their way to the bachelor's degree. The students build, across a series of projects, a shell that can execute commands and run simple scripts. The sorts of problems encountered introduce the students to the nature of C at a very low level, as well as the sorts of structures that can be used to solve practical problems.

Many of the high level more theoretical classes are language-agnostic, and many of the students use either Python or C#. I think that it's good that these higher-level theoretical classes allow us to choose our own language, because I think that the ways in which different programmers attack the same problem might bias them towards one or another language.

Recently, the lower-level classes had their programming language changed. Heeding the argument that Ada wasn't super relevant in the higher-level classes, the faculty changed the language to Python. This was, I think, a mistake. My opinion is that the lower level classes should be taught in C for many of the same reasons Rohlf mentioned. I think it's important that the students have an idea of how their data is being represented on the disk so that they could better understand the costs associated with certain tasks.

The best argument that I heard for Python was that not everybody taking these into classes go on to write the sort of code that requires something fast or efficient. Python makes data processing easy, which is really the most important thing that students should learn in intro-to-programming classes. I'd say this is a fair point.

Unfortunately at some point, teaching OOP became all the rage in schools, and so C++ is chosen instead. That's a mistake, Java or C# should be used for teaching OOP, C should be used to teach data structures and at least some algorithms. Without hands on memory allocation, you're not really getting a full understanding of how data structures work.

This is likely to be horrible advice. I don't doubt that there are good C tutorials on youtube, but there are probably also hundreds of extremely poor tutorials that are seductive and even highly rated because the people rating don't know better.

K&R C is excellent. I don't like overbearing advice, but "Every serious programmer should read K&R C" isn't bad as far as such advice goes.

I don't particularly like the "Learn X The Hard Way" series (maybe it is the right way, but I find it too painful), but there is Learn C The Hard Way [0].

[0] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/

I say learn assembly first, then learn C.

Then do whatever you want.

I bought into this previously after hearing it constantly repeated, but don't anymore. Your point about OOP is fair, but I think there is a sane subset of C++ that is incredibly useful for teaching new programmers. One thing to be avoided is needless OOP hierarchies. User-defined types are an incredibly powerful abstraction, and makes certain programming tasks look and feel extremely natural. If you listen to Stroustrup talk about C++, this is what he tends to highlights about C++, not the advanced features. Those can come later.

C++ has plenty of warts, and I dislike certain parts of it as much as its detractors, but C++ is still an awesome language.