You are being rhetorical, but over its long history dialects of BASIC have been used to write a huge amount of software. It was the first generally accessible i

You are being rhetorical, but over its long history dialects of BASIC have been used to write a huge amount of software. It was the first generally accessible interpreted language, and its influence on programming today is no less than Lisp or Smalltalk. It was a major driver of early personal computing, got Microsoft rolling, and in the process produced a huge crop of programmers that allowed the web to be commercialized and become what it is today. You make it sound like it was an ill-conceived goal to make a simple and understandable language, but the reason most of us aren't writing our CRUD apps in BASIC isn't that we all moved to APL.