Have you tried learning Scheme? My first language was C, which I learned very much as if were BASIC (plus pointer arithmetic), and I related very much to Dijkstra's observation when a couple of math major friends and I started learning about continuations in college.
Either my friends were unequivocally smarter than me, or my knowledge and experience with C/Java/Python really got in the way of my understanding. The difference in how quickly we grasped the material was really clear: my mental model was that of saving and recalling the call stack. Their conceptual model was quickly somehow intuitive in a way I still don't fully grasp.
I've heard that introductory courses that use Scheme go over pretty well, but most people's heads explode when they take Programming Languages I (in Scheme) at my university. It seems that after 3 or 4 years of Java, C and C++, their minds have formed certain expectations of what a programming language is supposed to be like (which is helpful when learning a new language that shares those expectations).
Either my friends were unequivocally smarter than me, or my knowledge and experience with C/Java/Python really got in the way of my understanding. The difference in how quickly we grasped the material was really clear: my mental model was that of saving and recalling the call stack. Their conceptual model was quickly somehow intuitive in a way I still don't fully grasp.