That may be true, but it will not be until you descend the stack you start to code like someone who understands what they are doing. For instance I started off with PHP in high school and was using arrays with each entry as a string with a colin in it to split a key and value apart. So essentially I created the worlds worst hashmap and each lookup was O(N) - not to mention the actual string splitting I was doing on each element which would've most likely caused several memory copies.

Why not at least start with some basics at the bottom of the stack and ascend quickly? As Dijkstra mentions he believes a lot of people have had at least small exposure to programming prior to their tertiary education - hence they probably already started at some point in the stack anyhow.