Thank you for posting this reply as I agree with many of your points. Also, I didn't know about Racket, which looks like a good tool for teaching. I would like to learn more about how you use Racket. Many years ago, my high school taught fortran first and then assembly as the AP course. This was later changed to Pascal. I believe that assembly was used for some of the same reasons the author is suggesting C. However, I also think that learning Python and Go is a better starting point. Learning about pointers is going to cause a significant portion of the class to drop out or tune out. At some, they will need to learn more about memory addresses, but I think that it can come later when performance becomes more of a concern.