Because it’s functional and the syntax is relatively easy to grasp and it’s easier to write simple algorithms with it without having to worry about OOP concepts, visibility and other stuff.

It also enforces typing and a decent level of resource management which I believe is a good thing to always have in mind when it comes to optimizing memory and even execution.

This also can make learning new languages easier, and you now have some base knowledge to move on to fancier things like OOP and Templates.

It’s probably not as easy as other languages which come with tons of primitives that already do a lot of work for you, but going through these little things yourself teaches you that nothing happening under the hood is magical and that everything works in a certain way for a reason.

Also, having started with C myself, I honestly can’t manage to be too objective about it. I loved every minute of it…except not knowing how to use the debugger early on. That can save you a lot of headaches.

The first course we had at uni that also acted as a programming introduction to me was “Data Structures and Algorithms in C” and after that they followed with a C++ course which introduced OOP.

Every other language introduced after these clicked so naturally and easily thanks to their added syntactic sugar and memory management simplifications, so I think that starting with C is indeed the best start. I think some universities have their courses made public, but there are surely enough free online resources tackling this. I found this video after a quick search that might help.

I’m sorry I can’t provide any (tried and tested) suggestion, but I just wrote because I wanted to confirm that if you don’t shy away from C and start learning from it, other languages will feel like a breeze, and in the end, the languages are just tools…and learning to use these tools easier means you can pick the best tool for the job easier, and that kind of flexibility rules!

So I really wish you the best in this journey!