I am not surprised that large-scale programs were written in Dartmouth Basic, or that those programs satisfied the needs of their users. Some program libraries include programs in unstructured Fortran IV, which have been running satisfactorily for 60 years. Similarly, some very complex hospital systems were written in Mumps (aka M), in which, due to both the language and the programming style used, programs looked more or less like line noise.
I once consulted for a company that had a product written in Pick Basic. This product had been sold around the world, and was very successful in their market. They wanted to modernize the product, so they went to a big DBMS vendor with a target business problem; the vendor said it would take several months to produce a sample solution. The company gave me the problem description. The next day I went back with a PoC program, 50 or so lines of C++. I emphasized that I had used C++ just because it was convenient (and that really any standard language would do), explained what parts of the problem were not addressed, and estimated that the entire program would take about a week's work to do. The client agreed on this, but said (a) that they needed a solution that was compatible with Pick Basic, and (b) their programmers only knew Pick Basic and wouldn't be any good at learning anything else. I don't know what became of the client and their product. (The Pick system was a combination of a variant of Dartmouth Basic and a DBMS.)
I'm not in any way saying that Dartmouth Basic is useless. I am saying that creating this language was NOT the flash of genius Kemeny and Kurtz actually had, but that making computing accessible to non-experts was the actual point.
I once consulted for a company that had a product written in Pick Basic. This product had been sold around the world, and was very successful in their market. They wanted to modernize the product, so they went to a big DBMS vendor with a target business problem; the vendor said it would take several months to produce a sample solution. The company gave me the problem description. The next day I went back with a PoC program, 50 or so lines of C++. I emphasized that I had used C++ just because it was convenient (and that really any standard language would do), explained what parts of the problem were not addressed, and estimated that the entire program would take about a week's work to do. The client agreed on this, but said (a) that they needed a solution that was compatible with Pick Basic, and (b) their programmers only knew Pick Basic and wouldn't be any good at learning anything else. I don't know what became of the client and their product. (The Pick system was a combination of a variant of Dartmouth Basic and a DBMS.)
I'm not in any way saying that Dartmouth Basic is useless. I am saying that creating this language was NOT the flash of genius Kemeny and Kurtz actually had, but that making computing accessible to non-experts was the actual point.