I always feel like people who suggest python over c as the de-facto thing to start with, are probably people who started with something like c over something like python themselves, but forget all about how all that experience and understanding helped them make sense of python in an instant, and thus consider the 'easy' language a no-brainer.

To an absolute beginner, however, python is not only an incredibly complex system (except for extremely trivial things), but because it goes out of its way to hide its internals, it cripples users for years before they can figure out what's actually going on under the hood.

I'm fully on the "start with c, move to python" camp. The lessons just need to not suck, which I concede may be easier to do with c ... but it should still be c.