Counter-point: Everyone is grateful for our formative experiences because those experiences shape our identity, and we're obviously heavily emotionally invested in who we are.

But we highly overvalue which formative experiences matter. If I were to get into a time machine, go into your past, remove Scheme and swap in some other language, you'd probably be grateful today for whatever that other language was. It just hit you at the right time, like whatever song was on the radio when you first fell in love.

Every step on our path is dear to us because it got us where we are today, but there are many many paths and little reason to want others to follow in our footsteps. If anything, we should discourage that because the world doesn't need another me or you. It's already got those.