Everyone liked BASIC for 2 reasons, if they did not have much prior exposure to a Unix-like or VAX-like multiuser/multitasking environment in the 80's:

- BASiC was a very interactive environment. This new and awesome in the 80s. You could enter programs, run them immediately, edit, run, repeat without having to go through a compilation step.

- BASIC worked without any planning whatsoever. You don't need to declare variables, or even arrays if you only use subscripts 1-10. Strings handled automatically.

So it was really fun to play with. You could make your new computer do something rather quickly, and refine it over time.

Line numbers were needed on the old 8-bit systems that didn't have full screen text editors with copy/paste built in. It's how you told BASIC where to put new lines in the program.

Admittedly it was certainly getting long in the tooth in the 90's though.