People forget that these languages grew up alongside the computer they ran on. BASIC is a product of limited memory. It can run, as an interpreter, in a machi

People forget that these languages grew up alongside the computer they ran on. BASIC is a product of limited memory. It can run, as an interpreter, in a machine with 4K of RAM and nothing else. No ROM--No tape--No disk. Try that in any other language. The only ones that can even attempt that are Scheme and Forth. Dijkstra can slag BASIC all he wants; he had access to computers with megabytes of storage. We plebians, on the other hand, were quite lucky if we had 4K of RAM.