Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. — E. W. Dijkstra. Dutch computer scientist (1930–2002) Computers
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be reguarded as a criminal offense.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.