At what academic level are these students? Every university^ I know of teaches incoming students in a language with C style syntax and they handle it just fine.

^Except those which use scheme...

University of Warsaw lets students choose either Pascal or OCaml for introductory classes.

University of Edinburgh uses Haskell. (Although it was C when I studies there).

MIT uses python.

Carnegie Mellon's intro CS course has been in python for a couple of years, and we're switching to ruby for the coming year. Of course, that's followed by (Our own version of! =/ ) C, and then SML.

Question for those who know more than I: what are the tradeoffs of first learning one language in depth, then branching out versus learning several languages(/styles) early on?

Using python for a completely introductory course for students that had no prior exposure to programming is one thing. However, it must almost _immediately_ be followed by C (and later by Lisp, ML/Haskell) rather than be used as primary language of instruction.

Huh. Do you know when they switched from scheme? Northeastern I know still uses it, shame MIT stopped.