Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002)
In Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective, Dijkstra states:
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
It has been three years since his death, and it is obvious that I have not forgotten him, his quotes, and his graph algorithm.