I have even seen pretty darn impressive things done with VisualBasic back in the day. And that were not hobby things. I've seen it used in very important mission critical telecommunication equipment. The compiler was custom, not the one from Microsoft. After all, the language had pretty much anything other languages had.

How can a language be "inefficient"? You can say it lacked on expressiveness. Maybe was too verbose? But I would not place BASIC into the "verbose" category.

> Why do you think BASIC is not functional?

Because BASIC simply doesn't have first-class functions, and they would be quite hard to represent in a BASIC-like syntax while keeping the language idiomatic. Even the unreasonably clunky C pattern of having a pointer to a function taking void* as its first argument (to account for closure captures) gets you a whole lot closer to functional programming than even the fanciest BASICs.

Here, "functional" is being used to mean "ablity to function", not "relating to the functional programming paradigm".

I hate that languages have become fads. The concepts have not changed, but there is a constant churn of languages.

I don't have to relearn natural language every 5-10 years, but for some reason I'm expected to when it comes to programming.