Dijkstra famously said that programmers who started with BASIC are "mentally mutilated". But I think this applies a lot more to C and UNIX.
Most of them don't seem to understand how anything substantially different could exist in the world of computing - every other language and operating system is seen as either an inferior copy, or as another layer of abstraction building on top of C and UNIX.
To be fair, he was talking about classic BASIC which didn't even have user defined procedures but just goto and gosub similar to jumps and calls in assembly language. I remember when I started learning Pascal after BASIC on the Apple II and there was so much to unlearn about programming because how you wrote BASIC was so different from any other high level programming language.
Sure. Pascal btw. had a pretty "flexible" goto statement, I would say nearly as flexible as BASIC; Apple ][ Pascal was a bit more structured though. In original Pascal, you could use goto to even jump out of a procedure; Apple Pascal could only jump within a procedure, and only if goto was enabled at all, if I remember correctly.
Most of them don't seem to understand how anything substantially different could exist in the world of computing - every other language and operating system is seen as either an inferior copy, or as another layer of abstraction building on top of C and UNIX.