I do realize how difficult this all is, I still have some recollection from how I started to program and how alien it all seemed. And note that I first started with 4 years of C in high-school

However, I don't agree at all that having strings and numbers as different things was ever a problem. On the contrary, explaining that the same data can be interpreted as both 40 and "0" is mistifying and very hard to grok, in my experience. And don't get me started on how hard it is to conceptualize pointers. Or working with the (implicit) stack in assembly instead of being able to use named variables.