I don't want to derail his thread by disagreeing, but, to be completely honest, I don't even consider BASIC a proper programming language.

It was needlessly hard to type and edit, and impossible to structure your programs in any meaningful way. It wasn't even suitable as a learning tool. Having to number the lines made it hard to get into the ‘Flow’, if you know what I mean. It made programming slow and boring.

Someone in the thread mentioned that people did really cool things with it. Well, people do really cool things with legos, too, but nobody in their right mind would build anything _real_ with them. “I'm gonna build me a house with legos,” said no one ever. (Well, there's always the odd someone, I'm sure.)