Thomas E. Kurtz has died

Like several others here, my first programming language was BASIC. For this we owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude.

I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we're mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but you know, I kinda think we didn't turn out half bad.

I know literally zero working programmers who learned programming the way Dijkstra thought it should be taught — not even Dijkstra himself, as Donald Knuth once gently pointed out.

Practically everybody in my generation started off with BASIC. On the other hand, at some point (when?), this practice stopped, and the newer generations turned out fine starting out with more civilized languages.

Consider me naive, but what way did Dijkstra thought it should be taught? Someone who first learned to code in QBASIC

He probably thought programming students should be taught Pascal, the academic language he pioneered. It is quite different from BASIC.

Pascal was Wirth, not Dijkstra.