people talk about "BASIC" the programming language a lot but BASIC came in dialects and hoo fuckin BOY the word becomes meaningless once you start digging into them
I grew up on QuickBasic. I thought I knew BASIC. I did not know BASIC. QB is *miles* ahead of the BASIC built into home computers, including the Apple II and IBM PC.
The thing that stands out the most, to me, is lack of code blocks in IF statements. See, in QuickBasic you'd do this:
IF Y > 10 THEN
X = 0
Y = 0
END IF
REM program continues
IF Y > 10 THEN
X = 0
Y = 0
END IF
REM program continues
But this was not the case in IBM PC-BASIC, GW-BASIC or Applesoft BASIC, in which you had to do this;
100 IF Y < 11 THEN GOTO 150
110 X = 0
120 Y = 0
150 REM program continues
100 IF Y < 11 THEN GOTO 150
110 X = 0
120 Y = 0
150 REM program continues
Or you could do
100 REM program loop begins
110 IF Y > 10 THEN GOSUB 150
120 REM program loops here
150 X = 0
160 Y = 0
170 RETURN
100 REM program loop begins
110 IF Y > 10 THEN GOSUB 150
120 REM program loops here
150 X = 0
160 Y = 0
170 RETURN
People spent decades writing entire productivity apps and games in a language that forced you to write half your statements in reverse logic or branch to subroutines *ANY TIME YOU NEEDED TO DO MORE THAN ONE THING AS THE RESULT OF A CONDITIONAL*
I wrote a program in GW-BASIC that just draws cycling colors onto the screen and it took me multiple hours to understand the syntax and limitations of BASIC enough to grok how to simply walk down the screen, draw lines and shift numbers in an array 
The interpreter doesn't reset the screen mode when you BREAK, so every time I stop execution I have to run SCREEN 2 in order to see my code at any reasonable resolution. So I had to code in a keyboard handler to see if I pressed ESC and do the SCREEN 2 for me
all this shit is intriguing because *it actually didn't need to be this bad*. GWBASIC could have been extended with a feature to reset the screen mode and relist code after every BREAK, it's not like that would have been a hit to RAM or CPU or disk storage to add
GWBASIC also has code blocks! DO / WHILE / FOR all support it, so why not IF? Did that somehow punch up the parser complexity too much? Idgi.
My personal position is that BASIC was bad and we as a society deserved something better built into all our computers. C was not it either.
