"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
As I commented in another thread, the idea of being permanently damaged by being taught the Wrong Thing is a misconception about learning. Yet most of us are where we're at by having survived many such things.
I hope Dijkstra was being humorous. I used to wear his quote as a badge of honor.
I've dug deep into that quote and it wasn't even so much about the BASIC we know from the 8-bits. ;-) He also criticized every other major language at the time, except Pascal and (slowly emerging) C.
I know. I think he was just taking the piss and I love it. And yet, there's more than a grain of truth in this quote and in other salty aphorisms from Dijkstra, especially:
"The tools we use have a profound influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, our thinking ability."
I went from Basic to Pascal to C/C++ to Java to Python which bear more than a passing resemblance to one another. Am I habituated to overlook or discount other programming paradigms, like Lisp, Prolog, and Forth? I can tell you with certainty that I once was. My view was even more limited then than it is now, and yet at that time I thought I knew everything worth knowing.
I hope Dijkstra was being humorous. I used to wear his quote as a badge of honor.