[bobochan]

Yes, if you read the first Dartmouth BASIC documentation you immediately understand that Kurtz and Kemeny were designing a language that students could teach themselves, with the goal of them being able to transition to Fortran.

[analog31]

Amusingly, my physics and math classes all used FORTRAN, but my teachers were OK with me translating the programs to BASIC so I could run them on my crude MS-DOS computer. I had a copy of the IBM FORTRAN compiler, but it was this cumbersome beast that required two diskettes -- one contained the compiler and the other contained the linker, or something like that. And the complete compile/link workflow took several minutes. BASIC, and then Turbo Pascal, were game changing because you could run a program instantly.

BASIC even had crude array math via the MAT statement though I don't recall the details.

I got to my senior year, second semester, and had a meeting with my advisor to make sure I had met all of my graduation requirements. He looked at my record and said: "Hey, you were supposed to take a programming class. But you know how to program, don't you?" I said yes. He checked the box to waive that requirement for me. Then I started breathing again.