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I think it was Alan Kay who said something like "arrogance in computing is measured in nano-Dijkstras", so I agree that there's a nugget of truth packed with a

I think it was Alan Kay who said something like "arrogance in computing is measured in nano-Dijkstras", so I agree that there's a nugget of truth packed with a large amount of elitist hyperbole. The nugget of truth is that the paradigm you start with (and the longer you stick with it) influences your problem-solving process, and shapes your way of thinking in ways we don't necessarily notice. If you have a bunch of items and want all of them to have some operation done on them, do you think "I will map the operation over the items" or do you think "for each item I will do this operation on item[i]" or do you think "return the set of items which has this thing done"? Very different paths to the same result, and which path is best is extremely context-sensitive.

laumars 8y ago
The mind isn't so inflexible that it can only be shaped by the first language you learn. There are plenty of games developers who started out on BASIC. I've written file systems and I started out on BASIC. Granted some people. Might not have progressed much beyond BASIC but can we not judge those individuals on their own technical competence rather than blaming a language for corrupting them? You wouldn't say "web development destroys ones ability to write back end systems" despite HTML / CSS et al being even further removed from systems languages than BASIC. However equally there are some people who feel more comfortable in markup than writing Java (for example). It's very easy to blame the language when often it's the teacher or the individual (or a combination of the two) who struggles rather than the paradigm.