BASIC was almost my first programming language. Ten years before anybody had a home computer (1967), I decided that I would write a program. I was just a kid and I came across a keypunch machine in a small room at my high school. After reading a book on FORTRAN I keypunched a program that was supposed to solve optimization problems over sets of linear equations in a number of unknowns constrained by a set of inequalities. The algorithm for doing this is known as the Simplex Method.

I gave the deck of cards to a friend and a couple of days later I got the fan-fold paper output that listed a bunch of syntax errors and nothing else. I just didn't understand programming very well.

BASIC is what got me on track. I found a book in my local public library on the relatively new language BASIC. It was easy to understand and I practiced writing out the solutions to simple problems with paper and pencil. I didn't have access to a BASIC system, but I learned enough that I could try FORTRAN again (this time on simpler problems). After a few attempts (with the two day turnaround) I was successful and programming became a hobby that eventually led to a career as a real computer scientist.

BASIC was just right. It was concrete enough for a novice to understand while being much more expressive than assembly language. I've never actually run any program that I wrote in BASIC, but I have written programs in scores of languages since and BASIC got me started.

Today, there are better choices for a first language: Python provides students with a lot of power right away, and my daughter learned Scheme as her first language and never had difficulties in later classes with recursion or functions as values.