Learning BASIC made sense in the days of the Apple II or the Atari 800. It provided a nice-ish low-level abstraction of the computer, with PEEKs, POKEs and GOTOs to numbered lines. Today, with Ruby, Python and so many others providing simple ways to write simple programs, as much as it served us well in the 80s, we should let BASIC die rather than trying to mutate it into something that has no longer a place in this world.