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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.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

-- Dijkstra

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EW...

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I guess I would recommend perhaps LISP, FORTRAN and APL if you wanted to pick old time languages. More recently you might want to take a look at Ruby and Haskell, to pick a functional language, and COBOL, which has some interesting ideas in it you won't find in some of the other languages.

-- Guy Steele

Notice that he lists COBOL as a language to learn. I've always found Dijkstra to be a little over the top (often the only way to get people to listen), and Steele more pragmatic.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Programming-Languages-Guy-St...

Dijkstra was provably completely wrong about this: pretty much all the most talented programmers I have ever talked to or read about started with BASIC.

The starting language matters very little, the important part is to remain curious and to keep learning.

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