I’ll just briefly say that I disagree.  I believe that my development and education as a programmer was severely hampered by BASIC’s lack of functions, and I would not wish it on anyone else.<p>Python has many obvious separate levels of learning it.  At first, one could learn line-by-line coding, as done in the interactive interpreter, gradually moving into loops.   Then, one could spend a long time with functions, dipping deeper and deeper into data types, sequences, recursion, etc.  Only <i>after</i> this could one even <i>mention</i> classes and object oriented programming.  There is <i>no</i> reason to assume that one would need to learn all of Python all at once.<p>A good language is also a language which allows its users to <i>grow</i>, not a toy language which teaches its users the futility of ever trying to accomplish anything serious, which is precisely the feeling I got from BASIC.