It's true. I learned basic when I was a kid, it was enough. C was something that cost an inordinate amount of money to have a compiler for back then, and thanks to Richard Stallman, it is now finally free. I read K&R's original book about C. There is still few books as good. The BASIC manual that came with the TRS-80 color computer was very good for my age group.

But I still, at the age of 10-12 was visiting the university library when my mother was busy studying, and voraciously read books about X window system, writing compilers, object oriented programming.

But I just wanted to write C code. It wasn't until I was like 14 there was any free C compilers. The next best thing was a language called Amiga E. It was wonderful, like Go is today. Single fast compiler with inbuilt preprocessor, super simple grammar, and lots of good documentation and examples.

The field has hardly advanced these days except in small ways. It makes me sad. I studied C++ books for a bit, and I thought it was a nice idea, but it's really not. So complicated it makes it hard to maintain.