BASIC was my first programming language too. And I hated it from the moment the thrill of being able to program a computer at all wore off. It kept creating i

BASIC was my first programming language too. And I hated it from the moment the thrill of being able to program a computer at all wore off. It kept creating itches in me that I couldn't scratch, or even name until I dove into Pascal and, later C. In this respect JS is better. BASIC had the unique talent that although it was constrained like a "scripting" language, it didn't have the easy-to use high-level constructs. JS also was very minimal to start out with, but (a) you got something in return (the ability to run in a browser), and it was powerful in a few interesting ways (closures, and for good or ill, dynamic typing).