I never liked this argument. Doesn't have any inherent limitations, or proper evidence. You can just as easily say "you should not use a washing machine until you understand the pain of washing clothes with cold water". Or you should drive stick before going automatic. Or start programming in assembly, everything will seem easier afterwards.
Yes, modern languages are better then C. But they are not perfect. Programmers using them still have a lot of problems to solve and things to learn. It's just different things then with C, or assembly, or wiring transistors by hand. You have to face it, pointer arithmetic, while tremendously important in C, isn't really very useful in other languages. Knowing when the gc likes to start collecting on the other hand may be a good piece of information.
Wouldn't it be silly if a grown man got a bit of mud on his shoes and yelled "OH NO" and ran out of the room to the nearest washing machine to get his entire suit cleaned? In my experience, these are the actionscript-only coders, the people who only ever learned higher-level languages. They'll spawn a whole new object just to store a temporary number, or other silly things. They don't think it's silly, though. They don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
Yes, modern languages are better then C. But they are not perfect. Programmers using them still have a lot of problems to solve and things to learn. It's just different things then with C, or assembly, or wiring transistors by hand. You have to face it, pointer arithmetic, while tremendously important in C, isn't really very useful in other languages. Knowing when the gc likes to start collecting on the other hand may be a good piece of information.