I thought about explaining why, but ultimately decided against it. Felt like it would take much of the hotness out of the take :D

My rationale is that C++ not only implements pretty much every concept there is, it allows for high- as well as low-level programming. That way you can learn bottom-up or top-down... Or both! Whatever suits you. You can also use it for pretty much anything and natively on pretty much any platform. That's especially great for students with tons of different devices who don't know what they want to do later. And it has a lot of strange, basically deprecated stuff built in you can use as curious examples and to make the learning process more interesting.

Finally, if you can deal with C++, you can deal with anything. It is a horrible yet beautiful language.