Python is convenient, and in many ways, a great advance over the C programming language. However, just as teaching teenagers to drive automatic transmission is a practical guarantee that they’ll never learn stick, advising neophytes to learn Python is creating programmers who will never bother to learn how to code in C. And that, I believe, is a bad thing.

Interesting piece by Evan Miller about how new programmers learning Python don't really get the necessary fundamentals.

For what it's worth, I learned C first, but I wouldn't say that I did any really productive programming until I moved to PHP, a much more abstracted language.