[beetwenty]

There are a few rough edges in old BASICs(and they have been smoothed out in pretty much every one that's shipped since 1990 or so) but the practical truth is, to implement most code in a readable form, you don't need a great deal of expressiveness, syntactical sugar, or structured flow control, but you do need a few common data types and features to work with them, and even vintage BASIC does that much.

This is what people mean when they say that languages haven't progressed that much. There are places where they have(e.g. dynamic memory allocation features really do matter to large-enough, featureful-enough programs) but almost all the features can be dispensed with for the base case of solving one problem well. The tooling and ecosystem matter a great deal more since they make the difference between having a finished solution in hand and having to fight to get something built and deployed. I/O and protocol compatibility are major sticking points everywhere.