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Dijkstra. A smart man. But also an arrogant prick. The typical professor living in his own bubble who never dealt with businesses and commercial activities. Those statements are totally nonsense.

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When BASIC e.g. redefined what "variables" are and what the equals operator means, it did cause a generation of programmers to drift away from the long established mathematical definitions. This persists to this day in languages like Python. I have had to explain to my daughter that Python variables and equals are not like those in her maths lessons. Dijkstra was right to call out the bad decisions that were made, although I do concede his methods of doing so were not ideal.

FORTRAN is seven years older than BASIC and uses the equal sign and variables in the same way. Here an excerpt from the 1957 paper by Backus et al.:

"Evaluate the expression on the right of the = sign and make this the value of the variable on the left."

Good point, but IIRC Dijkstra didn't like Fortran either. ALGOL (1958) used ":=" for assignment, as did Pascal some years later.

His statements make a lot of sense: the first language learned often has a profound effect on programming habits. That's why proverbs like "one can program in COBOL in any language" appeared.

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