Discussing this with other tech folk in my circle of a certain age, I'm actually in favor of learning BASIC (old-school line-number basic) to learn how a comput

Discussing this with other tech folk in my circle of a certain age, I'm actually in favor of learning BASIC (old-school line-number basic) to learn how a computer works, because the conceptual model is not dissimilar to assembly language. Concepts of structured programming arise from noting patterns commonly used -- you start using GOSUB instead of GOTO; you tend to make your loops very strictly nested because otherwise the code becomes unmaintainable, you find yourself writing data structures to manage related records, etc. From there, the transition to structured programming becomes very natural -- just formalizing some concepts that you've already internalized.