In the beginning, a lot of the foundation of the C++ language was laid by taking things that were design patterns in C and making them language features in C++. While I do not subscribe to the idea that learning one thing somehow ruins you for learning another, it is true that if you start out doing C programming, you'll be doing some extra work that is handled for you in C++ by classes and vtables, and be learning design habits you'd have to drop to effectively use C++ later.

+1 on this. I used to advocate learning C as a precursor to C++, but that changed as soon as I took a C++ course: C and C++ code look completely different.

Before then, my justification was that C presented a cleaner environment than C++ to some of the core concepts, like pointers not being cluttered by having to know about references or the `new` operator. But things like that pale in comparison to the overall style of program design between the languages, which I think is far more important.