The mind isn't so inflexible that it can only be shaped by the first language you learn. There are plenty of games developers who started out on BASIC. I've written file systems and I started out on BASIC. Granted some people. Might not have progressed much beyond BASIC but can we not judge those individuals on their own technical competence rather than blaming a language for corrupting them? You wouldn't say "web development destroys ones ability to write back end systems" despite HTML / CSS et al being even further removed from systems languages than BASIC. However equally there are some people who feel more comfortable in markup than writing Java (for example).

It's very easy to blame the language when often it's the teacher or the individual (or a combination of the two) who struggles rather than the paradigm.