It's the best language for teaching structured top-down programming. It forces the student to do things "The Right Way", vs. hacking around. Later, when the student knows why s/he shouldn't do it "The Right Way", then "The Right Way" takes its place as merely "One Of Many Right Ways". But, that first initiation is still extremely important.

I think that the move colleges are doing to teach in Java or C++ is bad. C++ is an extremely poor language to learn how to program in. It requires too much knowledge on the part of the student and allows too many shortcuts. While that's good for power users, students are, by definition, not power users.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.