BASIC didn't really raise the abstraction level away from imperative statements and loops. It let us hack faster, but it didn't help us to write programs that were provably correct. I think that is what Dijkstra was getting at. He was worried students would think this was good enough. And he was right. BASIC influenced a generation, my generation. The generation that gave us arguably the next BASIC, Python. A language with little coherence, that mixes imperative commands and mutation with the lambda calculus; and has no static types. A language that makes easy tasks easier, but hard tasks harder.
