Back in the late '70's and early '80's (before the PC had a wide range of software) one of my business partners admitted that he'd been making most of his money with BASIC. Everyone else, of course, denied that they used it. One colleague told me that he could do anything I could do in FORTRAN in BASIC. Of course, my group had written the BASIC interpreter at the university in FORTRAN. That was before the timeshared BASIC became generally available. We still had a batch OS, but when the multitasking OS became available, it came with a resident BASIC interpreter.

RE