There was never the cult-like following of BASIC that we see with JavaScript. While there were people who did prefer BASIC for one reason or another, virtually all of them would readily admit that it was inferior to languages like C (and C++ later on), the various dialects of Pascal, and Fortran for any serious work.
We don't see this when it comes to many JavaScript programmers today, however. A lot of them don't even know any other languages aside from JavaScript. Others refuse to acknowledge its many, many inherent flaws. This in turn leads to them trying to use it for serious work, often with disastrous results. This is especially apparent with node.js and server-side JavaScript development getting more and more hyped.
I'd much rather deal with a BASIC programmer who at least knows and acknowledges the downsides of his preferred language, rather than a JavaScript programmer who either doesn't know or refuses to admit the vastly more serious flaws with his preferred language.
There was a pretty big BASIC cargo cult back in the day.
I didn't even really know what C/C++ were for a fair few years of programming apart from some vague notion that they were used for games because they were faster.
In fact back then you had to pay for C compilers usually, whereas BASIC interpreters were often free with the platform so it was fairly common to have never used anything else.
That became further cemented with Visual Basic it's legions of copy/paste & visual designer oriented developers.
Javascript has a large following not because it's a particularly great language but because it is so ubiquitous. The draw of stuff like node seems to be more to do with code-reuse and having a language that is async-by-default rather than necessarily not knowing anything else.
There was never the cult-like following of BASIC that we see with JavaScript. While there were people who did prefer BASIC for one reason or another, virtually all of them would readily admit that it was inferior to languages like C (and C++ later on), the various dialects of Pascal, and Fortran for any serious work.
We don't see this when it comes to many JavaScript programmers today, however. A lot of them don't even know any other languages aside from JavaScript. Others refuse to acknowledge its many, many inherent flaws. This in turn leads to them trying to use it for serious work, often with disastrous results. This is especially apparent with node.js and server-side JavaScript development getting more and more hyped.
I'd much rather deal with a BASIC programmer who at least knows and acknowledges the downsides of his preferred language, rather than a JavaScript programmer who either doesn't know or refuses to admit the vastly more serious flaws with his preferred language.