I'm not a new Hacker News user. I just had surgery and I don't feel like getting up and looking up my password.

I've always heard that learning ANSI BASIC or any basic, Q basic, Microsoft basic, any of them, first; usually leads to a lifetime of bad programming habits.

So of course I learned basic first, but then I was like, oh, I'll just learn Fortran, and then C++, and then I got completely lost and never found my way back.

Until Python, technically.

Technically I learned the drag and drop Lego Mindtorms first. Don't know what kind of habit forming research there is about that.

Any of them are a big step from "computer is just for MS PAINT" to "wow, it actually did something I told it to".

By the time I got to the Z80 stuff I had abandoned basic (though learning C from Arduino is also something people tend not to recommend). Once I learned some Z80 assembly and I encountered BASIC again, I was struck by how similar assembly language and BASIC are, specifically the setting variables and then jumping around all the time part. They taught this stuff to kids!

I'm sure you turned out just fine and don't use goto in Python ;)