"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." ~Edsger W. Dijkstra
As skeptical as I am about adhering to a specific language for teaching programming, quotes like this smack so badly of curmudgeon-ism (yes, I know who Dijkstra is) that I can't take them seriously. I learned on BASIC (and LOGO) as a young child myself and transitioning into a production language wasn't an issue.
Nonsense. I taught myself BASIC in the '80s when I was 11. I had no trouble whatsoever grasping OOP, recursion, event-driven, or functional programming.
Perhaps this is due, in part, to the fact that I was self-taught, and moved to QuickBasic Pro before I did any serious work, and left the whole world of line numbers, gotos, gosubs, and line labels behind.
I learned BASIC on an Apple II+ and I don't think Dijkstra was right on that one. It's really a different path than the one Dijkstra endorses, but it's not more or less wrong than any other.
