I'd go so far as to suggest that Dikstra was right, but without the Basic qualification. It is very hard to teach programming to students. Most students at th

I'd go so far as to suggest that Dikstra was right, but without the Basic qualification. It is very hard to teach programming to students. Most students at the time had some exposure to Basic (there was little else available to the non-student at the time), but programming is hard. Most students make lousy programmers, especially if one adjusts for the standard Dikstra might have been hoping for. He chose to see Basic as the common denominator in the ones who failed (with the "almost" qualification to cover the outliers) but I'd suggest that correlation is not the same as causation. Then again, who am I to argue with Dikstra?