Dijkstra famously said that programmers who started with BASIC are "mentally mutilated". But I think this applies a lot more to C and UNIX.
Most of them don't seem to understand how anything substantially different could exist in the world of computing - every other language and operating system is seen as either an inferior copy, or as another layer of abstraction building on top of C and UNIX.
> Dijkstra famously said that programmers who started with BASIC are "mentally mutilated"
He knew how to make friends.
To be fair, he was talking about classic BASIC which didn't even have user defined procedures but just goto and gosub similar to jumps and calls in assembly language. I remember when I started learning Pascal after BASIC on the Apple II and there was so much to unlearn about programming because how you wrote BASIC was so different from any other high level programming language.
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No point trying to justify what he said, history has proved him wrong.
This industry was built on foundations laid down by people who started by with basic on 8 bit systems.
Exactly my own sentiments!