Yes. And Dijkstra would be wrong. (Or, perhaps more accurately, prone to somewhat bombastic hyperbole.)
BASIC is structurally similar to ASM, moreso than is any other HLL, at least of any popularity. Like almost any language (or paradigm) it is possible to get stuck in its particular ruts, and when BASIC was at its peak popularity there were probably lots of people stuck in those ruts just as later happened with Java and the static, class-based OO paradigm more generally. A learning language isn't something you stock with exclusively, it's something you learn with and then diversify from, ideally, and for that, BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative BASIC) is great.
BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative) is structured as the "ASM" language for an old-school desk calculator from the 1960s, with a few tacked-on features around string manipulation, input handling etc. plus more, depending on the hardware. It was fine for what it was in the 1960s (a simplified "scripting"-focused version of FORTRAN), but the needs of even slightly more modern coding are very different, and BASIC would not serve them well.
Yes. And Dijkstra would be wrong. (Or, perhaps more accurately, prone to somewhat bombastic hyperbole.)
BASIC is structurally similar to ASM, moreso than is any other HLL, at least of any popularity. Like almost any language (or paradigm) it is possible to get stuck in its particular ruts, and when BASIC was at its peak popularity there were probably lots of people stuck in those ruts just as later happened with Java and the static, class-based OO paradigm more generally. A learning language isn't something you stock with exclusively, it's something you learn with and then diversify from, ideally, and for that, BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative BASIC) is great.