We're looking at it from modern eyes though. Compare BASIC to the other programming languages of the 70s and 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_progr

We're looking at it from modern eyes though. Compare BASIC to the other programming languages of the 70s and 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag... * Pascal * Prolog * C/C++ * Ada * MATLAB * Eiffel * Erlang * Perl * Tcl If I were a beginner, I'd take BASIC over most of those. BASIC does have warts and having it ubiquitous did help its adoption, but the language itself was "easy to use" for its day. (Perl is pretty good, but BASIC had a two decade head start on it.)