Dijkstra's go-to language (pun intended) was Algol 60 (& Pascal) – everything else was shit in his view. Some of his comments:

FORTRAN — "an infantile disorder"

COBOL — "the use of COBOL cripples the mind"

BASIC — students exposed to it are "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration"

PL/I — "the fatal disease"

APL — "a mistake, carried through to perfection"

He liked his languages and programs to be easily traceable with pen & paper. He always wrote programs on the paper (and proved correctness) and only then into computer. REPL-driven development (what APL pioneered) was a foreign concept to him. He would be so appalled by LLM code generation.

He liked to be able to reason about programs without running them. He preferred simpler languages because they contain less irrelevant noise which got in the way of that.