I took the liberty of quoting the first sentence of your comment as the first sentence of the article intro. I couldn't agree more with you :) It's all about

I took the liberty of quoting the first sentence of your comment as the first sentence of the article intro. I couldn't agree more with you :) It's all about picking the right tool for the job, and the language itself, as it evolved, picked the concepts it could use from everything else - like other languages do as well. I hope I didn't convey a message of BASIC being for kids - it just happens that many people that start their adventure with programming (especially in the 80s and 90s, but often also today) look for a simple language to learn the core concepts of how a computer operates internally. It's also a little like with Python - you can create a complex and deeply structured application with it, but it's also a language great for simple scripts that will look much more like the BASIC programs - glueing together a bunch of statements to get to the result ASAP. And this is extremely useful. It seems like the same characteristics that made BASIC so good to start coding are also the ones that get the most criticism, which is a fascinating paradox.