Exactly this. BASIC may not have been ideal but it was approachable and widely available. It was on almost every inexpensive computer on the market for a sizeable window of time.
When my family got our first computer in 1985 not only did learning BASIC start me down my eventual career path it also provided my blue collar dad (via a community college night class in BASIC) a great promotion from factory line worker straight to warehouse foreman when his workplace began computerization of their logistics and he was one of a handful of candidates who’d ever touched a computer before.
