My first language was actually GWBASIC on an ancient hand-me-down computer, followed by QBASIC. When I saw that quote as a teenager I was terrified that I had

My first language was actually GWBASIC on an ancient hand-me-down computer, followed by QBASIC. When I saw that quote as a teenager I was terrified that I had killed my career before it had even started. I've since become quite proficient in C, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, HTML, JS, shell scripting, and many many other languages and environments. So IMO there is very little modern merit to the idea that exposure to BASIC (or any other mocked language) is "mentally mutilat[ing]".