>>25
I have been given an (already old) computer and a BASIC crash course when I was 6, and it didn't make reading the wizard books (including your favorite) harder.
Not that it isn't a shitty languages even for beginners, and of course all my BASIC idioms were replaced over the years as I got to use nicer toys.
But saying that using shitty languages cripples the mind forever is stupid. I know for a fact that that if misguided adults didn't tell me this stuff as a kid, maybe I wouldn't have learned to code at all.

Not that what I said applies at all to Python or Ruby, since there's no honest way you can consider them shitty.