Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most "1st year of CS" people do not know C or understand how pointers work, let alone an 'opcode'
C is not a mandatory subject in first year of CS where you live? At least it used to be where I live, pretty universally (although at that time our universities were in the middle of a Pascal-to-C transition, so as to speak).
My CS curriculum didn't have any "learn this language" classes, you were just expected to know the language that the class was taught in, with the exception of one of the classes that spent some time reviewing OCaml concepts.
Mostly it was C/C++ and Python for the scientific/numeric classes.