I loved BASIC as a kid. C was really confusing because I was constantly committing egregious memory errors without realizing it, the spooky effects were totally mystifying to me, and I didn’t even have the reasoning tools to know where to start with debugging it. It was definitely distracting from simple logic.

On the other hand, it made me think a lot about computer memory, and it makes computer memory easy to work with. Now I’m really comfortable with memory and encodings so that’s nice. I don’t think I would have gotten that by starting with Java or Python.