Why do you think BASIC is not functional? Our modern world does not differ from the 1980 world at all. Variables are variables, subroutines are subroutines.
It fall out of fashion, along with Pascal, Perl, Ruby, but that's just fashion.
It fall out of fashion, along with Pascal, Perl, Ruby, but that's just fashion.
How can a language be "inefficient"? You can say it lacked on expressiveness. Maybe was too verbose? But I would not place BASIC into the "verbose" category.
Because BASIC simply doesn't have first-class functions, and they would be quite hard to represent in a BASIC-like syntax while keeping the language idiomatic. Even the unreasonably clunky C pattern of having a pointer to a function taking void* as its first argument (to account for closure captures) gets you a whole lot closer to functional programming than even the fanciest BASICs.
I don't have to relearn natural language every 5-10 years, but for some reason I'm expected to when it comes to programming.