Tons of people learned using BASIC, but that never really took off for serious programming outside of a couple niches (like frontends / desktop apps made in Visual Basic).
If you're counting VB, it was huge, just not cool. Nobody ever talked about it, but people built tons of really effective custom software for banks and the like. Maybe you don't consider that serious programming, but it was probably the most successful product of the RAD desktop era.
I vaguely recall a Joel Spolsky (?) podcast years ago mentioning that everyone thought it was dead, but a survey showed something crazy like 30k active developers worldwide. And that was classic VB, not VB.Net.
BASIC as it was and VisualBasic are mostly not the same language, like how you can't say C is going strong in business because C# is so popular. Even Classic VisualBasic is more like Object Pascal than the line-numbered BASIC dialects people who learned on eight-bit micros and MS-DOS used.
And there’s more competition coming in this space with Epic’s Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN) and Verse (which is going to land into the base UE5 engine soon according to their talks, so useful outside of Fortnite!)
