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Not sure I agree. GC is essential in industry (well, I'd argue that! Ignoring embedded anyway) but I think the programmer has to understand the real cost, and that means allocating and de-allocating, and if that is hidden by the GC then they're not learning that.

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This is something much, much more easily learned with your second, or maybe even third programming language rather than with your first.

True, but you don't need to get them to write C (or similar) in order for them to get to that point later on, once they can write basic stuff. In that regard, D is excellent because it does allow you to write code without the GC once you've mastered the basics, so it may be a (very) advanced part of a course to optimize some algorithm by manually managing memory, and seeing how much difference it makes.

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