[IceCreamJonsey]

If you're used to exclusively programming with line numbers and you're a kid, sure, it might take a little bit of time and instruction to comprehend that line numbers aren't necessary. But from what he wrote it just sounds like this guy is whining about (when faced with students like this) having to actually do his job.

[Jtsummers]

Fortran and BASIC at the time were, in many ways, the antithesis to his ideas of what a programming language should be.

They did not permit recursion (direct or indirect). Almost by design they encouraged spaghetti code (the thing Structured Programming was meant to work against). They encouraged (or required) global state. They discouraged modularity. They were effective languages (in the sense that people got stuff done in them), but they were poor languages when compared to the capabilities of their contemporaries.

[GoblinSlayer]

I didn't have an impression that line numbers were important. Most of the time they did nothing and were unwieldy to maintain, they were more nuisance than anything else.