I agree, partially. It's a terrible language to solve complex problems with, because of the reasons you mentioned. In the article, I mentioned trying to do Adve

I agree, partially. It's a terrible language to solve complex problems with, because of the reasons you mentioned. In the article, I mentioned trying to do Advent of Code in it, and at some point the loops through strings, and GOSUBs started to obscure what I'm actually doing. But it also made it easy to learn. You got more done after learning a few keywords. With more evolved languages there's more to teach in order to make one aware what would be the preferred solution, so that they don't bang out unstructured code forever. The same lack of features makes it quick to grasp. Most of the keywords have a specific functionality, only a few actually "structure" the program and control the flow and the variables. It gives you the opportunity to jump straight into what you want to do. This, plus booting right into distraction-free BASIC environment within a second was a powerful combo. I believe that if someone keeps learning, they will outgrow that feature set, and prefer having functions and procedures, to hide away the complexity of some operations. But you could start learning even doing BASIC-level coding in, for example, Python, and use the more advanced constructs later on. It's one of the languages where a tutorial wouldn't have to start with a "let's ignore what public static class Main public static void main means for now".