In the mid 2000s, intro CS classes started focusing on Java. These days Python occupies a similar niche. It's not until they start to take an operating systems class, possibly by junior year, that a student might be confronted with manual memory management.
Interesting. My CS course started right out of the gate with assembly. My fledgling computer course in high school started with Pascal instead of BASIC. Clearly, before "mid 2000s". Maybe I was taking classes out of order??? It was way to long ago for me to remember those details, but I was well underwater trying to jump right into the low level language. I remember struggling with pointers in Pascal until one day it finally clicked. Assembly came across to me as a weed out course right at the beginning.
In the mid 2000s, intro CS classes started focusing on Java. These days Python occupies a similar niche. It's not until they start to take an operating systems class, possibly by junior year, that a student might be confronted with manual memory management.