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I totally agree, and this is why I am quite angry with the "basic is bad for your brain" statement from Djiktra. I understand the sentiment, but the idea that starting with very basic "non-rigorous" language is not only a waste of time but will even hold you back make me lost several years on my programming career.

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I see where he was coming from but I initially learnt BASIC (on a ZX-81) then moved to Pascal (Turbo Pascal on DOS) then Delphi with side branches into C and a some other languages.

These days I'm a web dev mostly using PHP and a lot of Python, I feel no need to justify my choices anymore, I could write a HTTP stack in C if I wanted to but I choose not to.

Ruby looks interesting, Go looks interesting, all this stuff is good stuff, I hate the attitude of "because X exists I must defend my choice of Y to the death", nothing is lost personally when someone else uses another language.

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