Your priors are all out of whack. Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8. Programming is much more accessible now than then, but the overwhelming majority of people still don’t know any JavaScript or python or anything else.

Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.

BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.

Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.

I had Turbo C as a young teenager, but really learned C at the csh prompt of a terminal connected to a giant DG/UX computer in my first summer job.

I actually still don't know BASIC.