E.W.Dijkstra

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.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

Edsger W. Dijkstra,
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra