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• It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC
  as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Dijkstra...
• BASIC - 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....
• BASIC /bay'-sic/ n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960
  which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers....
• APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the pa
  it creates a new generation of coding bums. -- Edsger W....
• PL/I -- "the fatal disease" -- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5...
• The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5...
• Many companies that have made themselves dependent on [the equipment of a certain major manufacturer] (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems.
  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5...
• FORTRAN, "the infantile disorder", by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today
  it is too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use....