"If he had stuck with BASIC, he might not have had the protocols he needed to write what he wanted."
Perhaps, but today, you can likely call out to the shell for anything which your language doesn't provide. Need a webpage? Use cURL. That's what I will do, if I decide to use this new language that I recently discovered.
"C was nothing like BASIC. It was far more exciting and looked much cooler with all its obscure syntax and low level semantics."
His "About Me" says that he loves simplicity, yet his choice of language seems to have been due solely to being seduced by flash. A tremendous amount of bad code has resulted from decisions made in such an impetuous and shallow manner.