Learn C Programming and the Rest Will Come

I started to learn programming (and C) by doing Harvard's CS50 course. It was only after couple of years had passed that a lot of the things I learned then - allocating memory, pointers, writing functions that in other languages would be abstracted away into a library - have begun to really seem of value to me.

I wonder whether it is better to start with Python or JavaScript so you feel productive and can see more immediate results from your programming, or to start with C so that very little of programming is "magic" to you. I still haven't arrived at an answer, but I agree that some exposure to writing C is something that I would highly recommend.

I see this sentiment a lot around here and while I agree that C should be one of the first languages people learn, I don't think that it should be the first.

I started with Pascal in my first year CS course and then moved to C. Pascal with its clear structure (begin, end) but similar process to C was a good lead in, and I doubt going straight to C would have been anywhere near as helpful when learning programming from a base level of nothing.