FORTRAN —"the infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I —"the fatal disease"— belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
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.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
At this point I'm ready to say "Dijkstra considered harmful" or "the use of Dijkstra quotes cripples the mind, their use in discussions should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
Agreed. Most of the time, it seems the pithy quotes are the only thing that the quoter knows about Dijkstra.
> You end up having to explain why blanket bans on goto don't make sense
For Dijkstra's GOTO quote specifically, there's a wonderful document by David Tribble named "Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective" that does a line-by-line analysis of Dijkstra's paper and explains what Dijkstra's meant in the context of his time and examines where usage of GOTO still makes sense today.
> 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.
Though, to be fair, he would likely say that about a lot of mainstream languages today. Iirc he was very fond of Miranda, which in many ways was a precursor to Haskell.