[ThrowawayR2]

> "I genuinely feel that Dijkstra’s famous rant about BASIC had a big hand in killing it off. I don’t think it was the intention but it created so much bias against BASIC."

Seems doubtful? In the essay where his famous comment on BASIC appeared ("How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF), Dijkstra took a snarky swipe at many of the major languages of the time: PL/I, COBOL, FORTRAN, APL and COBOL and FORTRAN at least are still around. It was just what in modern parlance would be called a shitpost (no, really, read it), albeit more articulate than most.

(I joke that Real Programmers™ get their shitposts immortalized in ACM publications: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/947923.947924 )