Why is BASIC a great introduction to programming? Genuinely curious. It's a bad language by pretty much all computer science standards. It only has global variables. In the past it used line numbers not labels. Many Basics only allowed 2 letter variable names. It has almost no library. (I suppose those could be added but they're already available in other languages). AFAIK there is little to no tooling for BASIC (meaning no auto0completion or popup docs that many languages have now)

I grew up on basic on TRS-80/Apple II/Atari 800 and I have super fond memories of those times. You can even find lots of my BASIC code in old magazines from the 80s. But, I don't really believe those were better than today with kids with Scratch or Unity or other alternatives. Python or JavaScript (runs everywhere) etc... Maybe even PICO-8/Lua etc...

Are there some concrete reason BASIC is actually a good place to start?