I'd avoid using BASIC for anything serious these days, but I'm part of the "BASIC was my first language when I was 5" club, so I have to respect it as a teaching language (although I'd go for Python nowadays).
I wonder how much of the spaghettiness BASIC is infamous for is due to the language, and how much is about the programmer's mental models -- my recent raytracer for the ZX Spectrum [0] is a pretty straightforward transliteration of my JS ones.