As an undergraduate I had to use Modula-2 in the first year programming courses. It was a decent language for teaching programming, but I don't recall anybody who liked it. Those in systems programming quickly switched to C the next year.
It may still be useful for teaching. Low level enough that you can teach memory allocation, etc. Simple enough that you can cover most of the syntax in an introduction course.
That's fair. I taught myself to program using C, and C's conflation of pointer parameters with arrays, and its declaration syntax, confused me at first. And I also ended up with more unexplained glitches segfaults in the beginning due to arrays not being bounds checked. It might have been easier to start with something like Modula-2 in the beginning.
It may still be useful for teaching. Low level enough that you can teach memory allocation, etc. Simple enough that you can cover most of the syntax in an introduction course.