Because we keep building on top of things, and trying to make stuff simpler to use, rather than simpler to change. Hence why I'm curious to see what programming could be in 10-15 years time, when programmers had an iPhone (or equivalent) they _whole_ life.
"Because we keep building on top of things, and trying to make stuff simpler to use, rather than simpler to change"
wow, very good point
It's been a long time since I have used BASIC, but is Python really harder?
It introduces some concepts that are absent from BASIC. If you think about it, BASIC, with its limited conditional branching, no concept of functions - it was set variables, then use GOSUB, with all variables being globally visible, is very close to the machine language of the host computer with some added types. If you wanted to do recursion, you'd need to invent a stack.
Python is much easier than BASIC for anything other than the simplest of tasks. Plus there is memory safety and much more dynamism. It also encourages you to write in a more explicit fashion than things like LISP or Ruby or Perl (ug!) that I prefer.
Classic BASIC is memory safe, if you don't use POKE to alter a memory location or CALL to invoke machine code.