I don’t think you’re wrong at all. I was not a kid at the time, but APL was the first language I learned. There is one drawback: it kind of spoils you. If you continue to do any programming you’ll probably have to use other (inferior) languages, and you’ll always miss APL.
I think in some way anyone's first language will spoil them for whatever that language is best suited for. My "first" language was Z80 assembly, because I wanted to make games for my calculator (I ended up writing just one[0], also "first" because technically my first was TI-BASIC of course). I've missed feeling like I directly was speaking "to the metal" ever since. Don't get me wrong, I'm super-happy with the high-level languages I've used since, but whenever I have to wrangle efficient code out of JavaScript there's some (probably misplaced) nostalgia for when I didn't have to worry about whether or not the JIT will kick in or not.
Hm, i'll have to disagree. My first language, decades before i became a programmer, was Commodore Basic. When i started learning programming in earnest, my first languages were Java, C and Python. The first language that spoiled me was ReasonML, compiling and reloading a JavaScript frontend in milliseconds. The first real job using Typescript was like watching paint dry. Around 30 seconds of waiting for compiler, linter and the rest of tooling on each push? My colleagues disabled the linter to get work done.
