Why learn Fortran?

> Good programmers should learn many programming languages, as such the first one they learn should not need to be the one they will be using to make a living.
>
> C has the advantage that it's small enough that you can teach the complete language in a short time (when was the last time you saw a language book as small as the K&R C book?, or even one only double it's size?)
The Little Schemer, the Lua 5.1 Reference Manual. If the goal is to learn programming in general, I'd say that these language make much more sense than C -- no need to bother with memory management, mysterious bugs due to out-of-bounds memory access or C's idiosyncratic syntax and the preprocessor.

On the other hand, if your goal is to learn C++, learning C first doesn't make any sense either due to the reasons mentioned earlier. So unless you actually want to read or write C code, I don't see a reason to learn C.