I've always found this quote (apparently originally from 1975) somewhat strange, having grown up in 1980s, when BASIC was pretty close to the only game in town

I've always found this quote (apparently originally from 1975) somewhat strange, having grown up in 1980s, when BASIC was pretty close to the only game in town for a decade for home users. I still ended up seeing a lot more skilled programmers get started by early tinkering rather than through dutifully attending a college course in the formal derivation and verification of software constructs after having carefully kept themselves unsullied of writing programs without being absolutely sure what they are doing. There may be a point in the underlying sentiment, but the thing as a whole just rings false in the post-microcomputer age. The big difference might be that the people Dijkstra was thinking of probably had had BASIC taught to them as university students, instead of tinkering with the BASIC repl of the 8-bit microcomputer they got their hands on as 9-year olds.