I strongly disagree with the author. I've introduced tens (maybe hundreds) of people to code and starting with code (instead of a GUI) and preferably lower level (like C or VB) code is the best way to keep people motivated. What I've found is that people tend to settle in the less difficult path. After teaching python, no one cared to learn C, after teaching things like dreamweaver, no one cared about html. Even when they realised the benefits, they already had a tool that was good enough. If your objective is to simply make people more maker, ok, but I yet have to meet someone that would follow the described path.
Author here. Thanks for sharing your experience. But how do you know whether Python or C served his needs better? For all I know it could be Python -- you can build a web server using Django, write scripts, do machine learning, do computer vision using OpenCV... These might very well be more useful to that person than what C lets you do. Nobody should learn C because you think it's important; they should learn it if, and only if, it's the best tool for what they want to do.