It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration
I have deep respect to Dijkstra but I don't agree with everything he said/wrote.
Many of my coworkers or friends programmers started with BASIC, questions below have answers that indicate many programmers had their first experience on programming at BASIC. AFAIK many good programmers started at BASIC programming.
I'm not talking about Visual Basic or other "modern" dialects of BASIC running on machines full of resources. I'm talking about old times BASIC running on "toy" computer, that the programmer had to worry about saving small numbers that need not be calculated as a string to save a measly byte because the computer had only a few hundreds of them, or have to use computed goto for lack of a more powerful feature, and many other things which require the programmer to think much before doing something and forcing the programmer to be creative.
If you had or have experience with BASIC, do you think that BASIC help your mind to find better solutions, to think like an engineer or BASIC drag you to dark side of programming and mutilated you mentally?
What can you say about the BASIC have helped you to be a better/worse programmer?
Do you remember your first time?
What was the first language you learned?
Why did you choose programming/development as your profession?