I will second that. I have always found it easy and more interesting to learn if I have a problem then solve it.I found the best way was to think of a problem and write a program to solve it.
My first program was assembly language on a Sinclair Spectrum and it was a platform game. It was pretty addictive.
From there I got asked at work to write programs for them and it quickly snowballed.
Later on I got into C, Delphi Pascal and eventually C# and the .net framework.
All steep learning curves but do-able with some perseverance.
Get to learn some modern language. Modern languages are not any harder to learn than BASIC (I would recommend Python or Scala). They are even easier because they have something that BASIC lacks: REPL, a thing you can interactively work with.E. Dijkstra said:I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.