Based on my limited exposure to "professional" software in the BASIC era... some pretty good stuff was a hybrid of BASIC and assembly language, leveraging the b

Based on my limited exposure to "professional" software in the BASIC era... some pretty good stuff was a hybrid of BASIC and assembly language, leveraging the best of both (BASIC was pretty good at laying out screens, input fields etc, at least on the Commodore PET, whereas hand-coded assembly language had the code density and speed). Was it a "toy" language? Sure. I once implemented a non-scrolling toy spreadsheet program with it - just a fixed grid of cells - with some simple formula capacity and a manual "recalculate" trigger. Was that educational? You bet. Was it sophisticated? Not really. But I'll bet there were absolute tons of one-off business applications written in it. A simpler version of what Excel was used for later, and still is. And scientific calculations? If Fortran could do it, BASIC could. Until something better came along to replace both.