>>4592
You paint an unfair picture of BASIC. Even some of the earliest were pretty decent. MBASIC for CP/M was quite alright, even though it didn't support anything in the way of graphics and such (normal situation for CP/M). But it's only some dialects that were crappy and forced you to use PEEK/POKE shit constantly. The MBASIC-derived ones for IBM PC (GW-BASIC, QBASIC) were pretty sweet, as was Locomotive BASIC for Amstrad CPC.
BASIC was nice because it didn't try to do everything, like modern scripting languages do. If you needed more power, you would eventually write machine code anyway, since the systems were slow and had very little memory (sooner rather than later, if you were stuck on something like a ZX-81).
Modern stuff is all bloated crap in comparison, and doesn't lead you to eventually learn machine language and the underlying architecture. You're instead forever trapped in their VM or runtime, like a little kid who never removes training wheels from his bicycle. Except he changes the color of the training wheels every few years, when a new fad language comes along.