I also find the idea that “if you teach kids bad procedural programming, they’ll form bad habits and struggle with modern languages” to be specious. I grew up

I also find the idea that “if you teach kids bad procedural programming, they’ll form bad habits and struggle with modern languages” to be specious. I grew up with BASIC (Q and TI), then learned a small amount of MATLAB as a physics student. When I took a class in Scheme later in college, I was blown away by how its syntactical constructs prevented me from making the kinds of errors that plagued my imperative/procedural programs - at the cost of some cognitive overhead. Cutting my teeth with GOTO didn’t make me resistant to structured (or functional) programming, it gave me perspective on why it’s often necessary.