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Basic is underrated.

It's the first programming language I learned, and I don't think it ruined my mind.

Actually it was the TI-99 BASIC which was a terrible version of basic. Only one statement per line. Super Duper Slow. No Peek/Poke/Call so there was no way out of it. But I enjoyed it because I could make the computer do something.
Other versions of basic were better. One thing the TI Basic had going for it was it was easy to define custom characters and make them colorful, and a sound statement was included. Not enough to make up for it not being able to program sprites for it when the machine did have them.

QBasic was probably the sweet spot for the stock version of basic included with the system. It had built in help and manual which is pretty easy to take for granted, but older computers you had to go find a book, and new basics you need a web site or several to know what it is you can do.

I sort of divide basics into old and new, where the old ones have line numbers and the new ones have labels and function calls.
The ones with the line numbers at least had the advantage in that you didn't have a separate environment to learn, it was just type a line number before the instruction and it was entered in. No editor or anything to learn.
The disadvantage is you're dealing with one line at a time, can't scroll up and down or easily edit something in the middle of a line. Just list and retyping. You can just enter the line in again. Some had an edit command which let you insert into a line, but it was different on every system.

The good thing about basic, especially the classic kind, is that you could be in front of an unfamiliar computer but if you knew it was running basic, you could make it do something without having to learn too much more. There were some differences though, and each version added stuff to its basic, but still you could get started and make it do something.

Here is a typical program to enter in to see if you're running a normal version of basic.
100 PRINT "HELLO WORLD";
110 GOTO 100
RUN

This would print hello world over and over until you pressed a key for break, or escape, or ctrl-C. This did show that you were entering in commands, in order. And the GOTO command makes it pretty obvious how loops worked. RUN was not part of the program but it's what would kick it off. You could replace HELLO WORLD with your name, or a rude word, or anything. Even a kid could understand it.

Freebasic is almost as good as C. It was a compiler instead of an interpreter. Well, it more or less is C with some libraries that resemble QBasic added in. Multiple types of strings and it links with c style libraries. At least it has strings rather than just character arrays.

PC's all used to have basic included. In MS-DOS it was gwbasic, and later versions it was QBasic. Older 8 bit computers often just booted up straight into basic. With Apple II you had to boot a disc to use basic with the disk system. Commodore 64 you got into basic right away. TI-99 it was in the menu, along with whatever cart you are in. Atari 8 bit the original did not include basic, they just shipped it with a cartridge, but later Atari 8 bit it was built in.

Now computers don't really ship with basic preinstalled. VBScript is installed but it will go away soon. There is VBA in the desktop version of Microsoft Office. There is Visual Basic for .NET. It is different than classic VB but seems like C#'s sidekick. An old version of C# (and VB.NET) does still ship with windows, but you do have to know how to access it. It's not in the system path unless you add it.

I think the successor to BASIC in that it is an interpreter installed on every computer, is Javascript. You could edit a page in notepad and open it in a browser, and you can make a program. It does require understanding a little more concepts than just basic would, but things are more complicated now. But if you look back you couldn't just understand basic by what is on the screen either, you had to look into the book that probably came with your computer. The web is now the main application of computers like the basic environment was back then. At least if you have web access you can access information about Javascript too.

I also think of lua as the successor to basic for me. I use it first before anything else really.