I disagree. Some of my friend and me were able to implement by ourselves RB tree algorithms by the 18th day of our month-long formation, and only one of us knew how to write code before this (and we almost reached his level the day before, when we implemented linked list algorithms in C).

After this formation, we were able to write a hashmap algorithm that handled collision in less than a day and a half. I honestly don't think we would have been able to do the same if the tools we were given during our formation were python, php or javascript. I don't think resolving the philosopher dinner problem in Go can teach you much. In C, it does. The biggest advantage C have is that you start from nothing, so you have to understand everything. I would not understand BTrees this well if i did not first understand linked list. And i think the thing that taught me the most about OOP was writing a raytracer in C.