As much as it sucked, BASIC had an important place as a dynamic language as early as 1963 at Dartmouth. GOTO wasn't all that different from a JMP in assembly.
BASIC was mature as a teaching language that you could run on a minicomputer by the early-1970s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E) and it came to dominate the market because there were implementations like Tiny BASIC and Microsoft BASIC that would run in machines with 4K of RAM.
There was endless handwringing at the time that we were exposing beginners to a language that would teach them terrible habits but the alternatives weren't great: it was a struggle to fit a PASCAL (or FORTRAN or COBOL or ...) compiler into a 64k address space (often using virtual machine techniques like UCSD Pascal which led to terrible performance) FORTH was a reasonable alternative but never got appeal beyond enthusiasts.
There was a lot of hope among pedagogues that we'd switch to LOGO which was more LISP-like in many ways and you could buy LOGO interpreters for everything from the TI-99/4A and TRS-80 Color Computer to the Apple ][. There was also µLISP which was available on some architectures but again wasn't that popular. For serious coding, assembly language was popular.
In the larger computer space there were a lot of languages like APL and SNOBOL early on that were dynamic too.
I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC with the occasional inline arm2 assembly block on an Acorn Archimedes A310.
It had its limitations, but it damn well worked and you could have total control of the machine if you needed it.
(also the Acorn Archimedes manual was about 40% "how to use the gui" and 60% a complete introduction and reference for BBC BASIC, which definitely helped; I had to buy a book to get an explanation of the ASM side of things but, I mean, fair enough)
Then again the second time I fell in love with a programming language was perl5 so I am perhaps an outlier here.
BASIC was mature as a teaching language that you could run on a minicomputer by the early-1970s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E) and it came to dominate the market because there were implementations like Tiny BASIC and Microsoft BASIC that would run in machines with 4K of RAM.
There was endless handwringing at the time that we were exposing beginners to a language that would teach them terrible habits but the alternatives weren't great: it was a struggle to fit a PASCAL (or FORTRAN or COBOL or ...) compiler into a 64k address space (often using virtual machine techniques like UCSD Pascal which led to terrible performance) FORTH was a reasonable alternative but never got appeal beyond enthusiasts.
There was a lot of hope among pedagogues that we'd switch to LOGO which was more LISP-like in many ways and you could buy LOGO interpreters for everything from the TI-99/4A and TRS-80 Color Computer to the Apple ][. There was also µLISP which was available on some architectures but again wasn't that popular. For serious coding, assembly language was popular.
In the larger computer space there were a lot of languages like APL and SNOBOL early on that were dynamic too.