For the same reasons that a lot of people associate Pascal with either Borland's older Pascal implementations or a limited, academic Pascal, a lot of people tod

For the same reasons that a lot of people associate Pascal with either Borland's older Pascal implementations or a limited, academic Pascal, a lot of people today think of BASIC in terms of the BASIC that they had access to, and the machine that it ran on, which was a hugely fragmented experience - every magazine printing type-in code had its own listing for each platform. And an older BASIC like BBC BASIC, which was one of the best of its era, still lacks some major conveniences associated with structured programs. It only gained record type support after Richard Russell ported it to modern platforms. The modern dialects are great, but diverge quite a bit from the early ones in that they have become fully structured with OOP support. What's ultimately driven people over to the current family of languages is that they are making programs that talk mostly to other software, not to I/O. When you add that constraint, you may end up using the language the other software uses for pragmatic reasons. The irony of that is that it really is totally arbitrary.