I and about a million other programmers started with BASIC. My second language was Pascal. I don’t imagine I’d be very employable if that’s all I knew, but it turns out that you can learn many programming languages and it’s not all that much effort after the first two or three. There’s no reason to think the language you start with should be one that you could get paid to use.
And no, I wouldn’t recommend starting with BASIC. But starting with Scheme seems like a great choice.
> it’s not all that much effort after the first two or three. There’s no reason to think the language you start with should be one that you could get paid to use.
Definitely!
This inspired me to list out languages I've learned to at least some minimal level and written programs in. Here they are, with the contexts in which I used them:
BASIC - middle school ;
Fortran - high school ;
C++ - self-taught & later some work;
Pascal - university;
Motorola 68k assembly - university;
Miranda - university (Programming Languages class only);
Ada - university (Programming Languages class only);
Lisp - university & work (CLOS);
sh - work;
ColdFusion - work;
bash - work and personal;
Java - work;
Atmel microcontroller assembly - hobby;
C - hobby (to replace Atmel assembly);
Ruby - work and hobby;
Scala - work;
Elixir - work;
Solidity - work;
Typescript - work and hobby;
Elm - work;
Clojure - work;
Javascript - work;
Python - hobby (with a tiny smattering of work usage over the years)
BASIC has a thriving hobby scene and there were compilers available for many platforms even if they weren't for "serious" computers. Scheme by comparison has essentially no community.
And no, I wouldn’t recommend starting with BASIC. But starting with Scheme seems like a great choice.