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I also taught myself programming in BASIC. On a TTY in the UCSC computer room, when I was in high school. From there I used it on Trash-80s, Comodore PETs, and then didn't use it again until after I graduated college, where several of my first professional programming projects were in BASIC.
When compiler time and memory were expensive, a tokenized BASIC was a reasonable solution to allow programming in resource limited environments. In many ways JAVA is the BASIC of the 1990's.
I didn't really learn to program until I wrote some assembly language programs. Lately, I've become quite enamored of the ARM assembly language. It's a very pretty little instruction set. I may even like it better than PDP-11.
I don't think that BASIC is really any better than, or even as good as, a lot of modern options that are easily available. When I was in college I taught an introduction to progamming class, through the "experimental college" at UC Davis in Pascal, rather than BASIC, because I realized that PASCAL was as good of a language as BASIC for learning. These days, I'd suggest C (or C++) or JAVA rather than Pascal.
