In my opinion, and assuming the author is talking about learning C as first language, my answer is that it depends. It depends on what you're trying to do with what you're learning, and what you will do after.

Basically, if you're studying to be an electronics engineer, I say that C is a good first language to learn the constraints of electronic devices. But if you're studying to be a mechanical engineer, I guess you want to learn programming to solve "data" problems (equations, graphical plots, etc). For the latter ones, something like Python with packages like numpy, matplotlib, etc., is probably more adequate.

In a nutshell, I think of learning C first as the bottom-up approach, and learning something like Python the top-down approach. Choosing one or another depends on how down or up you want to go..