Comment Re:So (Score 1) 709
Awesome post. Let me add one thing, though: If you like BASIC, you will love FORTRAN. It is procedural, so it is similar in concepts to BASIC; and it is extensible, so you can start with a Hello World program in Fortran with a PRINT *, "Hello World", similar to BASIC's PRINT "Hello World".
You can then gradually introduce concepts, such as loops and conditionals in the same way with BASIC; then, you can take on more complex ideas, such as variable typing and allocation (IMPLICIT NONE ftw!), pointers, modules/classes, and you can go all the way to object oriented fluff with the latest standards.
Moreover, FORTRAN is still being used in industry, and not just as a legacy language. There is extensive development of parallel code in Fortran, and the language still reigns king in High-Performance Computing. Thus, the language can grow and be anything from a crayon to a calligraphy quill as desired.