On the contrary, easy is what you want to avoid when teaching people. They have time to become jaded and satisfy their comfort-seeking weakling needs later in their careers (if any).

Therefore assembly is the best language to teach to newbies. Teaching implies guidance, which combined with something supposedly scary like pointers or complete lack of typing besides "byte, word, longword, quadword" will produce a kind of confidence that Java programmers can only dream of. Once "bare to the C library" assembly has been used to study the basic concepts of computer programming, higher-level languages may be taught with the promise of the compiler catching type-safety errors and not having to do function calls and register spills by hand.

Contrast the end product of a survivor of such a course with the sort who's ever been taught "heavy gloves so you don't hurt yourself" languages like Java and (as some in this thread propose) Python. Which one would you rather hire? The old-school guy who's got confidence out the arse, or the scaredy-cat Java grinder who has nightmares about the big bad NullPointerException and who doesn't understand why the garbage collector won't catch his file descriptor leak?