[Jtsummers]

Fortran and BASIC at the time were, in many ways, the antithesis to his ideas of what a programming language should be.

They did not permit recursion (direct or indirect). Almost by design they encouraged spaghetti code (the thing Structured Programming was meant to work against). They encouraged (or required) global state. They discouraged modularity. They were effective languages (in the sense that people got stuff done in them), but they were poor languages when compared to the capabilities of their contemporaries.