That would still not level the playing field for several reasons: 1) Some people may find Fortran easier to understand than others even if they haven't touched

That would still not level the playing field for several reasons: 1) Some people may find Fortran easier to understand than others even if they haven't touched it before. This was the case when my University decided to use Haskell* as the first language to teach students in order to level the playing field. It did help somewhat, it leveled the field for those with little and those without any prior programming knowledge. But to those who had already come to terms with recursion etc it was a very tiny stumbling block. 2) Some people need to dive deeper and gain a greater understanding of things before they feel at ease using them, but once they have reached that level, they will often outperform most other people. * This was 20+ yrs ago and Haskell was not so well known back then.